


A Kingdom, Broken

by tielan



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-20
Updated: 2009-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-03 10:32:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their goal was always to defeat the Wraith - or, at least, to find a way by which Pegasus could live without the shadow of the Wraith over them. But there could be no great success without an equally great price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their goal was always to defeat the Wraith - or, at least, to find a way by which Pegasus could live without the shadow of the Wraith over them. But there could be no great success without an equally great price.

"_I loved two men/A kingdom broke for it._"  
~Guy Gavriel Kay, "Guinevere at Amesbury"~

**   
**

**Prologue**

 

Teyla watched him pack his things away - so few things, a scanty collection of oddments and ends. He had never quite become accustomed to Atlantis, had never been fully comfortable in the city.

"And you will let Halling know where you are?"

He looked up, a faint smile of understanding on his face. "Every opportunity I have. Teyla..."

"I know why you feel this should be done..."

"But you do not understand it." They had always seen each other clearly, even as children. The view had become hazy during their adolescent years when she had longed to fight the Wraith and he had only seen the survival of their people. Then, during the years she was in Atlantis, they had grown apart still more - and it was only when he had invited her to share his bed that they had seen each other clearly again.

Yet, in some things, Kanaan was still opaque to Teyla; and he had confessed that, at times, her motives were inexplicable to him.

Right now, it was his decision to leave the city, their son, and her, and go out looking for Michael's bases that was confusing her. He had never craved adventure before, Teyla did not understand why he was seeking it now.

He saw her pensive gaze and drew the straps on his pack closed before coming over to her. "Teyla, you have lived in Atlantis so long - a part of these people, a part of their ways. It is...different, for you. You were accepted before you bore Torran."

"Motherhood is sacred to them, too."

"Special," he corrected. "Not sacred. Their parenting ways are not ours - you have seen how little they are involved in Torran's keeping, Teyla. That is not the way of Athos. And...it is less acceptable for the fathers to care for their children."

She stared at him, a long moment of dawning realisation. She had seen the surprise in the faces of the men and women of the city when she'd first said that Kanaan would care for their son. It had been quite clear that the burden of child-raising was borne by the women of Earth, along with the child-bearing, but until then, it had not occurred to Teyla just how different it might be for a man to raise a child.

"Have any of them insulted you?"

Kanaan's mouth tilted at the corners. "No more, I imagine, than you suffered when you first came here."

"And yet you are leaving."

"But not for myself." He took her by the shoulders, his fingertips brushing across her bare skin. "Teyla... Our son will grow up among these people. This is your choice as his mother, and I would not gainsay it. The Lanteans have much to teach him and much to show him of how to live. And his mother fights the Wraith for his future." Fingers brushed past her cheek, tenderly.

"There is a 'but' in there," Teyla said, keeping her voice light, although she could already sense what it was.

"I would be a father of whom he can be proud. And the Lanteans do not value fatherhood as do our people. It is not in their upbringing, they can accept it, and yet..." Kanaan trailed off. "Raising a child has no intrinsic value among them."

She had noticed that, also. Her advice was asked for less and less by her team-mates, her presence among them less welcome. Perhaps they did not sneer at her motherhood, but they were unsympathetic to her situation. Not all Atlantis behaved in such a way, but many did. It sometimes seemed as though she'd ceased to exist once she'd given birth, with nothing of value to offer the expedition beyond the fruit of her womb.

It had hurt - she would not deny that it stung - and she had taken refuge in Kanaan's presence and the joy and beauty of her son.

"Teyla..."

"We could return to our people."

Kanaan brushed back her hair, gently. "And you would be content?"

"Yes," she lied, even as she knew he saw the truth in her eyes.

"You would not," he said. "And could our people protect him as Atlantis does?"

"Michael is dead," she said. They had retrieved the body and burned it to ash on one of the piers, a great fire that had burned from sunset until midnight. Teyla had watched every moment of it, holding her precious son in her arms and telling herself that he was gone.

What was it that Colonel Carter had once murmured? _Ding, dong, the witch is dead._

"He made a duplicate of Dr. Beckett," said Kanaan.

"And Carson was certain this was the original."

Even so, Teyla had suffered her own pangs of fear, lying awake at night and staring into the dark. But there were some deep-rooted trees to which she must cling when the gale came, and this was one of them.

He kissed her, long and deep, and she knew it to be goodbye. "I wish I could be as sure. Teyla... I do this for many reasons - and in all of them, the choice is made. I am going."

Teyla knew better than to argue after that. Kanaan was a quiet man, but when he chose his path, he could be as stubborn as a _hathii_.

She held her son by the door of Mr. Woolsey's office as Kanaan submitted his desire to leave Atlantis, and did not flinch when Kanaan spoke of the desire to make his son proud of him in the way of the Lanteans.

She did not stumble as she went down the stairs with him, showed only a smile as he made his respectful goodbyes to Ronon and his more distant ones to Colonel Sheppard, Rodney, and the others who came to see him off.

She did not weep when he bent to kiss her, swift and brief and bitter, nor when his hand cradled Torran's head and he pressed his lips to the downy crown.

Teyla watched him go through the Stargate, out of Atlantis, and out of her life, without betraying her grief and anger and regret.

Then she turned on her heel as the wormhole closed, and took her son back to her room, alone.

**Chapter One**

  
In the cool Athos air, thick with the scents of roasting meat and celebratory incense, John was glad of the insulation of his leather jacket and the warmth of the hot _ruus_ wine in his hand. Maybe it wasn't Athosian-style clothing, but the Athosians were used to temperatures like these - one of the reasons they'd picked this planet to settle on in the first place.

"John." Halling strode across the uneven ground, a mug of warmed ruus wine in his hand. "Do you enjoy the night?"

"It's pretty good so far," he said, easing himself back against the fenceline that runs along the field border. Behind them, the Athosian village sat, mostly silent, and before them, the firelights and the shadows dancing around them seared bright and dark across John's retina. "You guys know how to have a good time."

Halling's long face stretched in a grin. "Life is a celebration, John," he said. "To be alive, to be loved - it is worth celebrating."

"I'll drink to that," John said, and clinked his mug against Halling's and took a deep draught of the ruus wine - sweeter and fruitier than John liked, but with an alcoholic kick that hit like a fist in the belly as it was swallowed.

"So," Halling murmured as they watched the dancers around the fire. "Teyla tells me that you are...together, now."

It was habit that made John hesitate, not reluctance to admit it. "Yeah," he said at last. "We haven't exactly been advertising it."

"The signs are there for those who can read you," said Halling simply. "But you need not fear the Council opposing it. You have proven yourself time and time again. There won't be trouble."

"Good to know."

John couldn't really care what the Athosian Council thought. As far as he was concerned, his relationship with Teyla was rooted in friendship and alliance, and where else they took it was nobody's concern but theirs. He'd already alleviated one set of concerns from Woolsey and Stargate Command, so he was a little belligerent about having to balance things out on the Athosian side as well.

But there were questions. There were always questions. Some of them were even John's.

"Have you heard from Kanaan lately?"

"Not in three seasons," Halling said. "A year by your calculations. We believe he is dead; for by now, he would have sent us word if he were alive."

"I'm sorry." It was a perfunctory condolence. John had never been comfortable with Kanaan, and Kanaan had never been comfortable with him.

The taller man's mouth curved a little at the edges and he clapped him on the shoulder with a slight grin. "As to that; regret is not expected of you, John. We are all, as you Lanteans say, only human." With a twitch of his finger, he directed John's attention to the woman who was coming down the track from the camp towards the fire-field. "I wish you happy, John."

Then Halling was off, exchanging a word with Teyla along the way, before he faded into the darkness.

"Torran's asleep?"

"He will be, very shortly," she said, accepting the mug he held out to her. "The children ran him ragged today; his sleep will be deep tonight."

"So, no interruptions, then?" John asked. An anticipatory shiver coursed through him as Teyla shot him a warm smile.

"No interruptions," she agreed and let him draw her up against him, setting the mug on the top of the fencepost at John's elbow.

The feel of her body against his was still a relatively new experience and one that John was enjoying growing used to. Teyla never melted into his arms, pliant, the way Earth women did. She expected to be met as an equal, expected John to fit himself to her as much as she fitted herself to him. It had taken some getting used to, but John liked it - the curve of her body as he smoothed the material of her trousers down over her hips and butt, the fullness of her breasts against his chest, the hands that slid into his hair and encouraged him deeper into her kiss.

John let himself drink in the taste of her, savouring the ache beneath his breastbone and the tightening in his groin. He'd waited a long time for this, longer than he'd realised, and even now, sometimes he wondered when it would all be taken from him. He knew she cared about him, knew she was with him because she wanted him...but sometimes he found himself wondering when he'd wake up from this dream.

There was a _fwoom_ from the firefield, and they broke apart, turning to look at the sudden flare of one of the central bonfires.

"The tar toss," she said. "Symbol of renewal."

"Is that safe?"

"We have celebrated this many times before," Teyla reminded him, laughing. "It is safe. John..." He looked back at her, at the glow that lingered across her cheekbones, flickering down her nose as she took a deep breath and met his gaze directly. "We could slip away for a little while," she said after a moment.

A grin started out on his mouth. "They wouldn't notice."

"They might," she said. "But they would not mind. And Torran is abed with the other children..."

"So no interruptions," John finished.

Finding time to be together in Atlantis was nearly impossible. Between the individual demands on their time, and the requirements of them as team-mates, there was barely enough time for them to relax, let alone find time for sex.

Just one reason Teyla had suggested the fire-feast.

"I think they can do without us for a while," he said, and let her turn them up the path Halling had taken towards the camp, his arm around her waist.

They hadn't taken more than a couple of steps, though, when the shouts and laughter of the gathering behind them hushed. To John, the quiet was ominous than screams of fear and terror. They turned in unison, staring back at the flickering flames, seeking some sign of what had just happened. Then Teyla broke out from under his arm and into a run.

"Something is wrong."

John groped for his sidearm and followed, his eyes scanning the shadows for some sign of what was up, watching Teyla's back as he ran after, less sure in the uncertain terrain. But even as he ran, he realised there was no sound above the crackle of the flames and the murmur of the Athosians, only the whisper of the wind in the trees.

Ahead of him, Teyla reached the edge of the firelight and the crowds, pausing by a woman to ask a question. John saw her stop, like she'd been shot, and put on a sudden burst of speed, nearly twisting his ankle in the process. He ignored the shaft of pain and kept going, pushing through the crowds to reach her side.

"Teyla?"

She didn't hear him, her eyes fixed on something across the field - on a man who was touching foreheads with a member of the Athosian Council, a brief smile touching his lips beneath the beard that covered his jaw and mouth.

No. For a moment, John couldn't breathe or think or process what he saw. Reason was gone, only emotion and reaction remained, and he made an aborted grab for Teyla's sleeve as she stepped forward.

The movement drew the eyes of the man across the fires, and his expression flared into sudden, brilliant delight. "Teyla!"

She half-turned her head towards John, enough to show him her expression - a helpless apology - before she stepped away from him and over to where Kanaan of Athos was coming forwards, his eyes hungry, his hands outstretched.

John watched as Kanaan took Teyla's hands in his and bent his head for his homecoming kiss, but anger, and grief, and jealousy made him turn away before they touched, and he turned away into the night, the darkness covering his pain.

\--

Teyla went looking for John as soon as the dawn touched the edge of the sky.

Far from the night of relaxation and pleasure she had planned, it had turned out to be a long and difficult night - not least because of Kanaan's return.

She had learned to think of him as dead; unable to reach him through her dreams or meditations, without news of him, without even a rumour of his passing. And in his absence, she had renewed her friendship with John, had found a new pleasure in that relationship, and discovered a care she'd thought long past.

He had vanished into the night; walking paths she knew better than to follow.

Halfway to Kanaan last night, she had realised that it would have been best to draw John along with her, to show Kanaan that things had changed. Instead, she had approached him alone, and Kanaan had greeted her with a terrible, open hunger borne of their long months of separation.

She had been forced to put him off, to take him aside and explain to him how things stood.

Between John's expression as she glanced at him by the fire, and the way Kanaan had paced the opening of the tent after she had explained why John was here, this night was not one she would care to remember.

And she did not know where John was.

At the split of paths, one that led to the hunting blind, one which led down to the river, Teyla hesitated, then crouched down, seeking signs of John's bootprints.

The noise of someone coming up the path from the river lifted her head, and a few moments later, John appeared around the bend in the path, as though she'd called him to her side.

Teyla stood, slowly, unsure of her welcome. What she wanted, at this moment, was easy enough - to go over to him and feel his arms sliding around her, his breath against her cheek, his body against hers. But she didn't know if he would welcome her or push her away, and so fear kept her still.

He looked tired; dark circles beneath his eyes as he stopped a few feet away and regarded her. "Hey."

"You ran off last night." It was not intended to be an accusation, but he flinched.

"I figured you'd want time with him," he said, after a moment. "Teyla..."

"You still do not trust me, after these last few seasons?"

John looked up, then, and she saw the doubts that had tormented him all night. "It's not a question of trust," he said. "I... He's the father of your son, one of your people."

"You were never a replacement, John."

His gaze slid away from her, and for a moment Teyla could have slapped him for frustration. She loved him, but he could be so stubborn when it came to his beliefs about himself.

"John..."

"What are you going to do?"

Teyla took a deep breath. "I have explained the situation to Kanaan. He understands." At John's disbelieving look, she qualified, "He is disappointed, but...he understands. John, I will not be torn between you, and you will not sacrifice yourself on...on your pyre of self-pity because you think that is what I want!"

She held his gaze, saw the glimmer of humour in his eyes for a moment, a flash of tenderness, before he looked away.

It hurt to be disbelieved, even knowing that his insecurity was born of his own childhood uncertainties. Teyla stepped forward and lifted her hand to his cheek, turning him back towards her. "Yes," she said evenly, "I still love Kanaan - he is one of my oldest friends, the father of Torran, and one of my people. But you are not a replacement for him. You are my first ally from Earth, one of my dearest friends, and the man I love. I have told Kanaan this, and he understands."

John's throat worked for a moment, then she felt his hands on her waist, and he tilted his head down against hers. "What are we going to do, then?"

Teyla closed her eyes for a moment, her relief as strong as a mouthful of the timi drink, used as a refresher the morning after a celebration. When she opened them, John was watching her with an amused green gaze and a question in his expression.

So she told him. "_We_ are going to go back up there and talk to Kanaan." At his raised eyebrow, she elaborated. "He says he has information about the plans Michael had for Pegasus and Atlantis."

\--

If Kanaan's eyes lingered briefly on their joined hands, Teyla was relieved to see that he, at least, understood the situation as she brought John to the tent outside which Kanaan was sitting, solitary in the Athosian encampment.

"Colonel Sheppard."

"Kanaan."

They did not shake hands or touch foreheads. Teyla did not expect them to, although she had hoped that Kanaan would be more reconciled to the realisation that she had moved on.

He had been gone for a year, without word for nine months. Even when they lived together in the city, Teyla had understood that things might change between them, if she desired it, or if he desired it. They loved, yes, but they had both understood that a shared bed and shared bodies need not be forever, in the Pegasus way. Life was short, and love was to be taken where it was offered.

She did not expect John to be comfortable with this. He came from a different world with different mores and standards after all. But he seemed easy enough as he poured himself a cup of tea and sat down opposite Kanaan.

"So," he said, getting straight to the point, "Teyla says you found Michael."

"Remnants of him," said Kanaan after a moment's glance at Teyla. "It was...not an easy search - he had hidden his tracks well. But there were hints to be found, if one knew where to look."

"And you did?"

"I suspected." Kanaan smiled, and Teyla found herself frowning at the piercing mockery in his expression. "Do you not trust me, Colonel?"

"Teyla does," John said, with a glance in her direction. "That's enough for me."

Kanaan stared hard at him for a moment, before his gaze switched to Teyla, and there was a measuring element in his eyes that Teyla had never seen before. Whatever had happened to Kanaan in the last few seasons while he travelled far away, she didn't know. What she did know was that she didn't like it.

Perhaps it was merely bitterness at coming back to find her with John; she couldn't tell - she'd never seen Kanaan jealous before. Even when she'd bedded others among their people and outside, he'd never been this way - but then, they'd been only friends then.

"What did you find?"

"A laboratory on a far-flung planet, mostly intact, with the remnants of Michael's experiments."

"And no sign of Michael?"

"I did not see him," Kanaan said.

"But?" John's eyes narrowed, hearing what had been left from the end of the sentence.

Kanaan hesitated. "There were signs he had been there - signs that he had worked there for some time. I managed to locate his notes and extract them from his database." He reached down to pick up the small bag that had been slung over his shoulder last night. Loosening the ties along the top, he pulled the sides down to reveal an oddly-shaped lump that Teyla remembered seeing somewhere, but not when. It looked sinuous, curved at one end, but with a chunky handle-type thing.

"A Wraith handheld database," Kanaan said at her frown. "I found it in a hiveship - the remnants of one."

John stared at it. "I've seen that before," he said, and his eyes lifted to Teyla's. "The cave that belonged to the Wraith scientist who modified your ancestor."

"I do not know from where Michael gained the hiveship, but it was not in flying condition, Colonel. I salvaged what I could from the database and stored it on that. I thought the knowledge something Atlantis could use." He looked at Teyla. "And I wished to see home again."

It was hard to breathe beneath the anger she felt - not in his gaze, but in the tenuous connection between them. She had always been sensitive to his moods, and he to hers. It was just one reason why his interest had come as such a surprise.

She wished there were words to express her regret, but she had spoken the truth to John, even if she had left off another part that he would not have wished to hear. He was not a replacement - that was true, but she had not told him that neither was he her choice over Kanaan. She had loved both men - loved them both, still, but the time for one had gone, and the time for the other had come.

In better times, perhaps Kanaan would have understood.

"Rodney's decoded one of those things before," said John into the silence. "If it's got more information about Michael's plans for the Pegasus galaxy, I'm sure we could use them. See if there's anything that still needs thwarting."

"That was my thought." The bag was drawn back up over the device. "When do we leave?"

"We?"

"I am very familiar with the device through my work these last few months," said Kanaan, and his voice held a note of anger that either John didn't recognise or didn't acknowledge, although Teyla heard it all too clearly. "And...there is unfinished business between Teyla and I."

John's eyes flickered up to her, then returned to Kanaan. She said nothing; it was John's decision to allow or forbid Kanaan from the city, although she hoped he would allow. It took him a moment, but at last he nodded. "All right," he said. "Atlantis it is."

\--

John was secretly glad when Torran refused to stay in his father's arms, squirming and screaming fit to make everyone in a twenty-yard radius wince.

"I'll take him," he said, careful to sound diffident.

Teyla lifted an eyebrow as Torran practically leaped into John's arms, wrapping his arms around John's neck like a limpet, but Kanaan shrugged. "He has not seen me for some time. It is no surprise that he prefers the Colonel."

The only problem with taking Torran was that it meant Teyla felt obligated to walk behind with Kanaan. And John was hard pressed not to keep looking back at them.

He trusted Teyla. It was just... He was still struggling with Kanaan's sudden reappearance and what it meant for him and Teyla.

"Don!" Torran hooked his toes into the pockets of John's vest, and used the leverage to hoist himself higher and point at the New Athos Stargate. "Dardate!"

"That's right, little buddy," John said, answering that broad grin with a smile. "It's the Stargate. We're headed home."

"Nandis," said Torran. "Down!" And he stuck his fingers in his mouth and sagged a little, becoming deadweight in John's arms and pushing against the arms holding him to indicate that he wanted to climb down. His diction wasn't the best, but he had other ways of making himself clear.

"Ah, no," John said firmly. "You don't have any shoes on."

"Down!"

"I said no," John repeated, feeling a flush along the back of his neck. He could command full-grown men, knew how to settle a fight between combat-trained marines, but when it came to a toddling boy, he always felt self-conscious about reprimanding him. Teyla had never indicated any concern with John's rules for Torran, but it still sat uncomfortably on him. Maybe it would have been different if Torran had been his, John didn't know.

What he did know was that Kanaan was watching him and Torran. He could feel the other man's eyes on him.

He'd thought about taking Kanaan aside for a talk. Thought about it. Discarded the idea. Other than being essentially uncomfortable with the niggling thought that he'd stolen Teyla from the Athosian man - never mind that Teyla was hardly a thing to be possesed - he didn't see the point. What was he going to say? _I'm sorry?_ Because he wasn't. And anyone expecting him to be sorry...

Well, Halling had it right. _We are all only human._

Teyla came alongside him as Jinto dialled Atlantis. "Are you causing trouble?"

He glanced up, thinking the question was directed at him, but she was looking at her son with what Rodney called 'the fatuous mom' look. Then her lashes lifted, and her mouth curved up in a tiny smile. "I will take him to Miko when we get back. Will you want to call a meeting immediately?"

"It'd be best." John didn't say exactly what he meant by 'best', which was to get the database interfaced to the Atlantis systems, and Kanaan out of the city as soon as possible.

There were some things Teyla didn't need to know.

Luckily, if Woolsey was a bit disconcerted by Kanaan's reappearance, Rodney took one look at the portable database that Kanaan had brought back and his eyes lit up like the bonfires afterthe tar toss.

"I mean, we translated most of Michael's research but there wasn't half enough data in there - for how long he'd been planning this, his notes were really sketchy. Plus, there were experiments that Carson couldn't find, so there must have been parts he was keeping back..."

They were back in Rodney's lab after the debriefing - just John, Ronon, and Rodney. Kanaan had wished to spend some time with Torran, and somehow roped Teyla into going with him. She'd glanced back at John, but what was he supposed to say? _I don't trust you with her, so you can run along and see your son, but his mother's staying here with me._

No. He was going to trust Teyla. He _was_.

"Can you get the data out of it?" John interrupted Rodney's monologue to distract himself.

"What? Of course I can get the data out of it!" Rodney scowled, first at John, then at the screen. "It's not the first time I've done this, you know."

Standing less than a foot away, Ronon tossed his dreads back, giving the impression of a toss of the head. "He wants you to hurry up about it."

"Hurry? Why--?" John watched as understanding dawned on Rodney's face, and he glanced furtively over to the door through which Teyla and Kanaan had gone to drop their son off. "Oh."

"Yeah," said John pointedly. "Oh."

"Right, well," Rodney hunched over his keyboard and hurriedly began typing. "I think I've still got the interface program I used back then stored among the subroutines. And, with a little bit of tweaking, I'm sure I can have the information off the device in, oh, the next hour or two."

"Can't be too soon," said Ronon.

Rodney frowned as his fingers flashed over the keys. "Why? It's not like Teyla's your girlfriend."

Ronon shrugged. "He's changed."

John noted the half-aborted gesture towards Ronon's gun and lifted his brows. "Trigger-itchy?"

Another shrug, while Rodney snorted. "Please. The man's always trigger itchy!"

"Changed how?"

There was a long pause before Ronon said, "Don't know. He's...different."

"Yeah, because now he's a Sammy Homewrecker, not just That Guy Who's Taking Teyla From Us," said Rodney without looking up from the keyboard.

Ronon grinned. "Gonna tell us how you really feel, Rodney?"

When Rodney stopped typing and opened his mouth to object, John grimaced. "Just get the database loaded up, okay?"

"Okay! Although I'd rather do a drive check first..."

"Can't you just copy the information over?"

"Well, sure, it'd be faster, but..." Rodney paused as he got a good look at John's expression, and grimaced. "Okay! I'll copy it to one of our standalones. Just...go somewhere else. Somewhere where you're not looking over my shoulder and making me nervous."

John didn't have anywhere to go - not really. The only place he wanted to be right now was where Teyla was with Kanaan. It was groundless, he knew. Teyla wasn't like that. She'd shoot straight with him, tell him if she didn't want him anymore.

He remembered a psych session once, years ago, after Afghanistan. _Memory is emotion. Strong feelings - of loss, of guilt, of betrayal - those linger long after the details of what have faded._ The psychologist had watched him with eyes that saw too much of John too clearly. _What we remember in any situation is how we **felt**._

John remembered the tight breathlessness in his chest the first time he saw Kanaan in Michael's hiveship - as Kanaan, not just another Wraith hybrid doing its master's will. He remembered the grim squeeze of an emotion he hadn't wanted to name as the other man reached out to touch his newborn son's head.

He remembered the sour bitterness in his mouth the day he'd come into the mess hall and found Teyla and Kanaan already seated, their legs tangled beneath the table, laughing at the faces Torran made at them.

He remembered the day Kanaan had left Atlantis, the guilty relief that swamped him as he watched the other man go. The man had done nothing to John, been nothing to him; it wasn't Kanaan's fault that Teyla loved him, that John was left on the outside, but it had been so hard to forget that he was out in the ocld.

John still remembered how it had felt to be on the outside. He'd had the comfort of ignorance in the years before Teyla's pregnancy. He'd taken the advantage of emotional distance to keep himself from the pain during that year when she was living with Kanaan.

He didn't have either bulwark this time, and if she decided she wanted Kanaan again...

_She won't. She doesn't. She wants you._

When John glanced up from his hands, both Ronon and Rodney were watching him. "What?"

Ronon jerked his head at the door. "Come for a run," he said. "Get your mind off...stuff."

'Stuff' about described it.

"Don't expect me to join you," Rodney warned, once again hunched over the keyboard.

"We wouldn't," said John pointedly, and followed Ronon out into the corridor. "Long, medium, or sprint?"

"Long," Ronon said. "Give you something to think abou..." He trailed off, spinning on his heel as the door to Rodney's lab slammed shut behind them. "What the--?"

Behind the door, there was a yelp of alarm. And, further down the corridor, John heard the sound of another door closing, and shouts from other people. He tapped his earpiece and got nothing - not even the initial burst of static to indicate that the mic was working.

He tried anyway. "Control? Woolsey?" Nothing. "Lorne?" Then, figuring they were closer to the labs, he added, "Rodney? Zelenka?" Only silence met his attempts, and he exchanged a look with Ronon, who was now pounding on Rodney's closed doors.

Realisation dawned on John as he watched Ronon trying to lever the doors open. They were locked - and good. "The Wraith database."

"What?"

Even as Ronon voiced the question, the lights in the city dimmed and died.

_Shit._

\--

It took Teyla a moment to realise what felt wrong.

Someone was lying in bed behind her, running his hand down over her hair, a gentle stroke of tactile fingers down the curve of her nape and across her shoulder...

She tensed, and jerked away, knowing the truth, even as she turned.

John was not the type to exchange caresses, even in bed. He would sleep within touching distance, or with his hand against her skin, but he was not a man to stroke her unless sex was on his mind. Kanaan had been more prone to contact, but never as lingeringly as the man who wore his face and watched her with reptilian eyes.

"He is dead," she said. It was not a question, but a certainty, and the man who wore Kanaan's face as a layer of seeming over his true being smiled.

"I admit to being surprised you did not realise it earlier, Teyla." Michael rose from the bed, unfamiliar movements in an all-too-familiar body. But the sense of him in her mind was wrong - had been wrong from the moment he'd arrived in the midst of the Athosian celebration. Teyla had thought it was simply time and bitterness that had made the difference in who she had thought him to be.

"How?"

Michael - she must think of him as Michael and not Kanaan - smiled. "There are ways."

Colonel Carter had once mentioned the Asgard, who had cloned their bodies, generation after generation, transferring their consciousness from one body into the next. Carson himself had been cloned and his consciousness transferred to the clone. His memories were intact, his experiences, his personality - but the body was not the one in which his consciousness had been born.

If consciousness could be copied into one body, then why not into another? And what better disguise in which to come to her - a loved and trusted friend, someone who was known and familiar?

She swallowed down the choking grief of realisation, letting it fill in the chinks and cracks of her horror at what must have been done to Kanaan.

And her son...

Alarm flared. "What have you done with Torran?"

He tilted his head. "I think the question is, what have I done to Atlantis?"

Only then did Teyla realise that the city around them was silent, its hum muted, its lights darkened. Shouts of alarm sounded out in the corridors, the distant noist of people trying to call to each other through locked doors. "The database you brought us."

"The lure of knowledge is, as always, the downfall of Atlantis." He shrugged as he moved around the bed. "It was nothing too difficult to arrange, even with the pitiful precautions they would attempt to take."

"If you think that I will let you take my son..."

"If I thought you would let me take your son, then I would be an idiot," Michael said. "I have no doubt that my other self made the attempt and failed. Had he succeeded, then this galaxy would have been under our dominion months ago. And," he added with a long look that needed no interpretation, "given your distaste for my touch, I imagine he made our interest quite clear, too."

Teyla's hands clenched in fists. "He did."

His laugh was repellent, a mockery of everything Kanaan had been to her through their years as he spread his arms wide. "And even in this form, I am not fair enough to tempt you, Teyla?"

"There is no form you could take that would tempt me," she said. Even looking at him made her gorge rise - a mocking recollection of the man she had lost and loved. That she had moved on did not change that she cared - had cared - for him.

The dark eyes flared with fire, shuttered. "And yet you pitied me once."

"That was long ago," she said. "Before you chose this path."

"Did I _choose_ to be experimented on by Atlantis? Was it my _choice_ to be outcast from the Hive?" The bearded lip twisted. "What '_choice_' did I have when I was fit for neither human nor Wraith community?"

Yet if he was outcast, still, he had chosen his own path of evil and cruelty, rather than seeking another solution. Whether he wore the form of Wraith or hybrid or human, the soul within the flesh had no compassion, no kindness, nothing but a great, towering bitterness for what had been done to him, and a burning desire for revenge on all who had made him, rejected him, or wronged him.

"What do you plan now?" Teyla watched warily as he came around the bed towards her. "Stop there," she said, and watched him come to a stop at the foot of the bed. "What are your plans now?"

His smile was unpleasant - a mockery of the tender smile that Kanaan used to give to her. "I thought, since we are stuck here, and Atlantis will take some time to assimilate the data it has been fed, that it would be an excellent idea for you to become reacquainted with this body." His eyes burned as he advanced towards her.

Teyla took a step back, but there was nowhere to run. Her heart thudded in elevated panic. She had no illusions as to what he would do to her. And when he was done, her memories of Kanaan - every smile and touch, every kiss and caress - would be gone.

Where was John right now? Ronon? Rodney? Michael said he had done something to Atlantis - the power of the city seemed out, the usual soft hum of the city was silenced. A virus, to take hold of the city and all its functions?

She did not know where the others were, or what they were doing. She did not know if they realised from where the danger had come. She must trust that they understood the situation, even if they did not know their enemy.

Teyla knew. And she would deal with Michael as she must, and let the others handle what was happening in the city.

She hoped her son was still safe in Miko's care, that Michael believed that as long as the city and Teyla were subdued, he could deal with her son at his leisure.

Movement before her warned her; her fear for her son must be put away. Michael was coming.

She fought him, just enough to let him believe that he had successfully overpowered her, but not so much as to tire herself out. And while his hands and mouth moved across her skin in a parody of the love Kanaan had held for her, Teyla opened her thoughts and slipped into the darkness of her enemy's mind.

In times before she had done this; but the stakes had never been so high - not just her team-mates, nor just the scientists on the deep-sea station, not even all Atlantis, but all of Pegasus at risk from the machinations of one man in her power.

Teyla threaded her way delicately through the maze of his mind, spreading exploratory tendrils through his thoughts, seeking out hints of what he'd done, where he'd been, his hopes for the future, his plans for Pegasus, seeking the core of what made him who he was.

Deceiving the Queen on the deep-sea power station had been a question of will and letting the Wraith believe she had control of Teyla. Controlling the Queen in the Wraith cloning facility had been about desperate need combined with brute force and the augmented ability through her son.

This was different. Even in his natural form, Michael had been merely a Wraith male.

Teyla had been a Queen.

He froze against her mouth as she ceased all subterfuge and scoured through his mind, every corner swept out, every thought picked over. What he tried to hide from her, she chased down, what he struggled to keep, she took from him. She was Queen and whatever he had become or tried to become, beneath it all, he was still Wraith, subject to a Queen's touch, a Queen's knowledge, and a Queen's control.

Through the link with him, Teyla felt the distant echo of like minds.

No. Not just _like_ minds, but _identical_ minds. Many Michaels - cloned, dormant and waiting for this one's return. The Hive was many, a collective, a community - and now Michael was no longer alone.

The 'original' Michael had indeed come to Atlantis all those months ago, planning the capture of her son and the offer he'd made. But he had left behind 'contingency' plans - including a clone of himself, and other plans to be put into motion should he not return. Taking Kanaan's form had not been one of them - not until Kanaan tracked him down, killing one of the clones before the next had activated and taken him by surprise.

Kanaan was dead, but his body had been viable - a possibility that Michael had contemplated and considered as he regarded the dead Athosian at his feet.

The reborn plan to infiltrate Atlantis had sprung from there.

There were still other clones of Michael, dormant and waiting. Upon his return, they would be 'updated' with his experience, so the next would know what had been tried and failed. If he failed to return within a set period, the next in the chain would activate.

Teyla took a deep breath; Michael was struggling against her control, and her time was limited, her strength rapidly draining. She knew what he had done to Atlantis - had seen it in the brutal scrape of his mind, and knew that with every moment that passed they were running out of time.

But this was more important than even Atlantis - the end of this creature who would stop at nothing to gain Pegasus. He would coerce where he could, and what he could not coerce, he would control. What he could not control, he would destroy, and his rule would be absolute.

She could stop him, but only if she acted now.

No time for consultation, for consideration, for goodbye. No time for regrets, or a last look or touch.

All her strength went into the contact as she sought the centre of his being - a bright flame in his mind, unconcealable in its brilliance, in its bitterness. Something writhed in her mind, the gasping struggles of a water creature, out of its depth and pleading for life.

_Teyla!_

She shut out the niggling compassion that ached in her, reached out past the human limitations of mind and meaning. She slid past his defenses and, with a swift, twisting gesture, killed the other versions of him whose mind-lights danced in an echoing darkness.

Michael could have been great in his way, a bridge between Wraith and human, understanding both. Instead, he had chosen to make a monster of himself.

_Teyla, please..._

She could have no mercy on him; he had shown none to her, her son, her people, or her friends.

_You wanted me,_ she said. _And so you shall have me, Michael._

She felt him clutch at her - dragging her close, like mental hands pulling her into the headtouch of her people. _I would have loved you,_ he said, and even in his dying throes the taint of bitterness still hung over his thoughts. _We could have been great..._

Too late, Teyla realised that she had let herself too close, that the grip he had on her mind was not one of intimacy but one of intent. Michael would drag her down into the darkness with him, unless she chose to spare his life.

To live herself - to survive - it was the first instinct of every human, whether Pegasus-born, or Earth-born; yet cold reason overrode it. Everyone and everything she loved stood in danger as long as Michael lived - what was her life before that?

The choice was simple, even easy.

Teyla chose the darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Interlude**

The city always had a waiting feel to it in the late afternoons and early evenings.

Beckett had once postulated that the transient, ethereal quality of the sunset and subsequent twilight worked upon the diurnal habits of the expedition causing a lull in activity and a shift in mood.

Upon the airing of this opinion, McKay had declared Carson to be full of it.

John - and just about everyone else in the expedition - had stayed out of the ensuing argument. But John especially. He had no desire to be caught between the doc who gave him his shots and the friend who most often used him as an outlet for everything that was annoying, wrong, or frustrating about his work and his life in Atlantis.

Whatever the reason, twilight in the city usually had its own charm.

Usually.

Tonight, though, John was tense as he paused outside the 'reading room', looking in at the woman sitting in one of the beanbags.

Teyla had seated herself and Torran so they were looking out at the fading sky, with their backs to the door. From where he stood, John could only see the line of her jaw running into her hair, already full of shadows.

He didn't need to disturb her. He could just walk away. He had before.

But the gap between them was wide enough; a careful, polite distance that John both resented and felt relieved by. For a while, he'd placed the blame on Teyla - she was always too busy with Torran, she had Kanaan to lean on so she wouldn't want him, she was the one who no longer participated in team meals or team nights.

Then Kanaan had left the city a month ago and Teyla had withdrawn even further. At the time, John had figured that if she wanted to be social with her team-mates again, then she could, she just didn't want to.

Two nights ago, Ronon had given him a pithy Satedan smackdown. "_You never organise anything she **can** participate in_."

"_Hey, she's the one who decided she couldn't spend time with us!_"

"_But you're the one with the freedom to change the schedule_," said Ronon. "_She's bringing up a child. Maybe that's not important to you Lanteans, but it's important to her_."

The confrontation had thrown John. Ronon wasn't usually so blunt - or so condemning.

Something in him resented that _he_ had to be the one to make amends to _her_. After all, _she_ was the one who'd withdrawn from them after Torran's birth.

But Ronon's words hadn't given him any peace.

_Maybe that's not important to you Lanteans, but it's important to her._

The accusation of not caring about Teyla's concerns had hit harder and closer than John liked. And, privately, he admitted he was tired of being carefully distant. It had been easier when he hadn't had to think about their friendship.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the room. "Hey."

She glanced up. "John." It was obvious he'd surprised her, but other than that one sharp move, she did nothing else.

The silence stretched out for a moment before John forced himself to break it. "How's he doing?"

"Growing," she said, looking back down at her son. Something flitted across her face - pleasure and joy, but tinged with regret. "So fast."

"Yeah, I heard they do that." John was never good at small talk - once upon a time, he'd known what to say to her - back in the early days, when the city and the people and everything was new, when it was just them. Now, he was a stranger. Somewhere along the way, they'd lost something, and John still wasn't sure what it was. "Is he still waking up at 2am?"

Teyla stilled, just a moment. "Not as often as he did. His rhythms are getting better."

"Or maybe you're getting more used to them," John offered. Then he felt like an idiot. Of course she was getting more used to them! "Look, I just wanted to say..." He hesitated. The last time she'd been trying to soothe Torran and come across John - the nights before and after Michael's city takeover attempt, he'd mostly ignored her situation - it had just been easier.

It would still be easier.

It just wouldn't be right. He acknowledged that now. "Now that Kanaan's no longer around to help...if you need a break, you can ask me to mind him for a while."

She blinked. "I..." It was her turn to hesitate. "I did not think you had any experience with children."

John could hear what was said underneath. _I didn't think you wanted to help._ And, at one level, it was true. At another...

"Well, I'm sure I can learn," he said after a moment. "It's not exactly rocket science."

Teyla's mouth twisted a little. "No," she agreed. "It is not. John, why are you here?"

"I was looking for you."

"And you have not felt the need to 'look for me' while off-duty for the last nine months."

He scowled. "Look, if you want me to leave, I can leave."

"What I want does not matter," she said.

"That's not true."

His instinctive response went unnoticed; she mowed right over him.

"John, you have no interest in my son's upbringing or his care. I should rather you be indifferent than pretend interest simply to...to satisfy whatever guilt Ronon has planted in you."

He stared at her, at the corner of her mouth that dragged to the side in a grimace. "Ronon hasn't..."

"He says he snapped you in the heels. And while his interference is well-intentioned, it is unnecessary. I do not wish for my son to imagine that your people endure his presence simply because his mother is useful."

There was a moment when the balance teetered, when John contemplated getting up, walking out and going to Woolsey to ask for Teyla to be transferred from his team. He'd thought she'd be _glad_ of his help, not angry because he hadn't offered earlier!

He opened his mouth and a little niggling voice - one that he'd been ignoring for the last six months every time Teyla came into the conversation - pointed out that he'd earned her disbelief fair and square. Maybe it stung, but she had every right to be sceptical of his offer.

He forced himself to think past the reactive anger - this was Teyla. And...she was avoiding his gaze, looking down at her son with her fingers brushing back a strand of hair.

"We don't endure his presence. We're just... We're not like your people."

"No," she agreed. "John, I have been thinking of returning to Athos."

For all that he'd been contemplating transferring her from his team a moment before, John's world went blank.

It was just a moment's shock - one more of life's slaps in his face. Then he scrabbled for something to say, just as an ejected pilot grabbed for anything that might be the emergency 'chute release on his free-falling chair. "I... Teyla, we can change."

She made a gesture with one shoulder - indistinct movement in the falling shadows but clear enough in meaning. "There is the joke about the therapist and the lightbulb, John - the lightbulb must want to change."

"We want to change." The protest was weak, and she made a noise that, in anyone else, would have been a snort of disbelief.

"John, Kanaan left because he feared to have his son believe him worthless." Her eyes measured his shift in the beanbag, the way he looked away at the mention of the other man. "Your people considered him unworthy of respect because he wished to bring up his child instead of doing 'worthwhile work.'"

John opened his mouth to contradict her, then closed it.

No, he'd never said any such thing, but he hadn't seen Kanaan as anything more than a babysitter, either. And if he hadn't joined in with Rodney's sneers at 'unskilled work', or the marines' jokes about the Athosian man being henpecked, he hadn't stopped them.

_Maybe that's not important to you Lanteans, but it's important to her._

Ronon had made it important - had been making it important over the months since Torran's birth. And maybe it was a uniquely Pegasus perspective, but they were in Pegasus, after all.

"We can change," he repeated.

The silence stretched out for a long time, pushed back only a little by the noise of the waves down on the pontoons far below the window, and the occasional sound of voices along the far ends of the corridors.

When she spoke, her voice was low. "John, I cannot do this anymore. If these are merely hollow platitudes, then I would prefer that you did not lie to me, and just let me leave the city. As long as Kanaan was here, I could be both mother and fighter; but alone... Your people - your way of life - leaves me no choice."

"I mean it," he said, stiffly after a moment of trying to sort through the confusion and conflict inside him. "We can change. I meant what I said about bringing him around if you needed a break." And he would take the kid for a bit to make it easier on Teyla - and find other people to do the same if he had to. "Atlantis can change, Teyla."

"I would like to believe you can," she said after a while. "But the sapling cannot promise the tree's shade."

In Pegasus terms, she'd believe it when she saw it. John told himself he could understand that, even if it stung his pride. "That'll do," he said. " And you won't leave Atlantis without talking to me first?"

It wasn't as though she could leave without talking to him, but it mattered to John that he wouldn't find out about it second-hand. When had he dropped out of the loop with Teyla? Had he been too busy nursing his sense of injury and insult to notice?

"I will not make plans to leave the city without telling you."

It wasn't quite what he'd asked for, but it was a start. And, given that John was beginning to understand she felt, it was probably all he was going to get from her right now. He'd set fire his bridges in pique and jealousy. Now was the time to scrape them back together and work out what was left and whether he could make something of it.

Torran lifted his head and made a burbling noise, then arched in what looked like a pretty obvious attempt to get out of his mom's arms. Teyla eased him up against her shoulder and began to attempt button up her top as her son squirmed.

"Do you want me to take him?"

Teyla's fingers paused over the buttons, and he lifted his eyes to meet her questioning gaze without apology. He was going to make good on this decision; he wasn't going to lose someone else he cared about, and he certainly wasn't going to lose her just because he was piqued that she'd fallen in love with someone else.

The thought zapped through him, like a live wire against his skin as his brain made the connection he'd been trying to avoid for a long time.

Of all the times to come face to face with the realisation...

John swallowed hard. Teyla was holding Torran out towards him - a bridge of trust that he still wasn't sure he wanted to cross. His life was a series of screw-ups, and the only thing that had made the last five years bearable had been Atlantis and the people in the city - among them, Teyla.

He didn't want to screw this up, too.

It took him a moment too long to respond. Her expression grew distant and she dropped her gaze back to the button she'd been struggling with.

_Seize the moment, or lose it all._ John got up from his beanbag, his arms outstretched to take Torran. "I'll try not to drop him," he said, only half-joking.

When she let him take the now-burbling kid into his arms, John felt a small sense of relief, like he'd been flying blind and had just dropped out from mist and clouds to familiar terrain.

Maybe things weren't perfect now, but they'd get better.

He'd make sure of it.

\--

**Chapter Two**

 

She recognised the woods - the forest on Old Athos, pine-scented needles redolent beneath her bootheels as she walked through the silent land, unnerved.

The woods were never quiet - not like this, without creature or critter, no wind or rustle of leaf, only the sound of her breathing and the thud of her heart above the crunch of dry needles under her feet.

There was no-one but her beneath the leaden sky, nothing living or moving in this place from which the Wraith had scorched all things alive and living on the planet in revenge against their escape from the hiveship. 'The One That Got Away' said the Lanteans, and Teyla had never explained to them that it had nothing to do with getting away and everything to do with the Wraith being Wraith.

But that had been years ago.

The forests would not yet have grown back, Teyla knew, so this was not real - could not be real.

She had fallen into darkness and woken to Old Athos.

Teyla had heard the talk of 'near death' experiences among the Lanteans: visions and seemings that had taken them during times of delirium or confusion. She had never experienced it herself - not like this, with such clarity.

Her people had always believed that death was another journey; that there was something else beyond the body's end.

Was this, then, her ending? She recognised this path - the moss-covered rocks and needle-strewn sod intimately familiar to her. This was the track leading from the camp to the Ring of the Ancestors - and the galaxy beyond Athos.

Metaphors for the journey beyond life?

Teyla turned back, to look in the direction of the camp, and saw only a wall of pale mist - no going back, only the journey forward, then. She took a deep breath and spared a tender thought for her son, for John. They would make their way in the universe without her from now on. John would stand for her son, as protector and guide. He might not feel himself up to the task, but Teyla knew Torran would want for nothing. John had his own care, even if he felt inadequate to the needs of others.

As she looked back at the mist, she saw something move within the whiteness. Amorphous and indistinct, it formed swiftly into shadows, coalescing into a man's form. Fear ran through her, coldly, and she stepped back, only to hesitate as something about it became familiar.

A moment later, the form became solid, a steady figure, clad warmly in boots and a coat Teyla remembered from long ago - worn and shabby, but kept for comfort's sake. "Teyla."

"Kanaan." Her heart gave a great leap of pleasure. She held out her hands and felt the anchoring warmth of his hands drawing them together, touching heads. "I have missed you."

"And I, you." His hands rested on her shoulders, a light grip, without the possessiveness she had experienced at the hands of Michael's imitation of Kanaan. This was the friend she remembered, the man she'd loved. "Torran?"

"He lives," she said. "Sometimes it seems he grows daily...."

It occurred to her that she would never see her son grow up, and sharp grief clutched at her heart as she lifted her head from Kanaan's.

"I was a fool not to realise that Michael had made more plans than I could hope to thwart," Kanaan said, moving easily into the silence. "And in the end, I doomed not only myself, but you and Torran, also." His fingers brushed her cheek and she allowed herself to lean into the caress.

"Torran still lives," she reminded him. "And John will care for him."

He nodded. "I know. He did not think much of me, but I knew he cared for you and Torran, even if he stayed away..." His eyes clung to hers as she looked at him, surprised. "You truly did not know?"

Teyla knew now; it had not occurred to her that Kanaan would have realised... But she did not give him his due. He had often known her better than she had known herself. How galling to realise she had not known him so well - that Michael's semblance of him had deceived her so easily. Even looking at Kanaan now, she could see the difference. "I did not realise you did."

His smile was tender and he bent his lips to her forehead. "Perhaps it is selfish, but I am glad you did not, then."

"Kanaan..."

"Just as I am glad that you do, now," he continued, ignoring her interruption. He stepped back, and all trace of amusement and tenderness faded from his expression, leaving it serious and shadowed. "You must go back, Teyla. Atlantis and our son need you."

Teyla turned, following his gaze down the path that led towards the Ring of the Ancestors. She was confused. "I am not dead?"

"Not yet," said Kanaan. "Your body still lives, clinging to life - it is only your spirit that is wanting."

She turned back. "And you?"

The smile on his lips was warm and wry, full of the tenderness she had never seen until the night he'd invited her to share his bed and she had accepted. They had loved and cared, but, with the advantage of hindsight, Teyla saw that they could not have gone on forever. Kanaan's pride - easy though it was - would not have allowed him to be seen as inferior by the men of Atlantis; and Teyla would have grown bitter without her dreams of freedom from the Wraith and her ability to fight in the war.

Still, they had tried.

"I am dead, Teyla. You accepted it - and Colonel Sheppard's interest - long ago."

"Kanaan... He is not a substitute for you." She felt the need to say it out loud, to tell him what John had never understood. Neither would ever be a replacement for the other - they were two different men, loved in two different ways. What she had shared with Kanaan was not the same as that which she had with John now. She loved them both; it was not an exclusionary choice to her.

Kanaan shook his head, a rueful smile tilting his lips as he shook her, lightly. "You have lived among the Lanteans too long, Teyla. Do you think I did not know that?"

Her cheeks tinted with the heat of embarrassment. "It is easy to forget."

"And I'm so easily forgotten then?" He laughed when she opened her mouth to protest. "Ah, Teyla." His hand lingered by her jaw and after a moment, Kanaan bent forward and pressed a kiss lightly to her lips - no passion, just a gentle brush of mouth against mouth. He stepped back, and if there was a wistfulness in his expression, Teyla felt his tenderness like fire against her skin. "Love is never a substitute, Teyla, whatever form it finds. You and I both know that, and if he is lucky, he will understand it too. Now," he added, "go and save those you love."

She let her eyes rest on him for a moment more, and then turned to go.

The Ring of the Ancestors flared as she approached it, opening without need of a destination address.

At the stairs, Teyla glanced back to see the dark figure standing at the edge of the white mist. One hand lifted in greeting and she felt rather than saw his smile as he turned and walked back into the mist.

Then she was alone before the Ring.

On the other side waited life and love - her people, her friends, and her future.

Teyla walked up the stairs and into passage.

\--

John went looking for Torran as soon as Woolsey let them out of the meeting.

"Where are you going?" Rodney sounded positively peevish as John made for the stairs.

"To get Torran from Miko," said John. "They've had him for over five hours now, and other than the message from Nicolas saying they're okay, we haven't heard from them at all."

"You're not going to go and...and baby-sit, are you?" Rodney demanded as he stopped dead in the middle of the darkened corridor. "Because in case you haven't noticed, we've got more pressing matters!"

"I know." John put calm emphasis on the words to make Rodney listen. "And as soon as I've found someone to take Torran, I'll be back to work with the chair."

He could feel the back of his neck heating up as he said the words, knew that Rodney wasn't going to get it. After all, John hadn't gotten it until Ronon had pointed it out, either. And Rodney was, well, a lot more close-minded than John in the balance between work and personal. It was a good thing Keller wasn't in a rush to have children.

If Teyla had been conscious and capable of looking after her son, John would have left the arrangements to her and headed straight for the chair room. But he was only too aware that without her, he was the 'responsible adult' for Torran John Emmagan.

The chair was a slim hope, anyway - John had planned to go and help Ronon hunt up people all through the city. There were some areas of the city that were dark, and others where people hadn't yet sent someone around to check in, so Ronon had offered to check things out.

John had offered to help, before being co-opted by Rodney.

But in the back of his head lurked the knowledge that someone was going to have to deal with Torran sooner or later. Preferably sooner rather than later since Miko had been dealing with him for the last four hours.

"Sheppard..."

"Rodney." John went and tried not to feel guilty.

If it was urgent - as in _right this moment now_, then sure, John would have left it. But he could spare fifteen minutes to get Torran and explain the situation to him, take him to see Teyla, and find someone to look after him. He hoped one of the infirmary nurses would be obliging, though.

He felt a bit better when he found Torran in the throes of a full, screaming tantrum in one of the labs.

"You're here to take him?" Asked Dionne Morris at the door, her lip curled in distaste. "Good. He's been like this for the last fifteen - ever since Miko said he had to stay here until his mom came for him."

John grimaced. Teyla wouldn't be coming for Torran anytime soon.

Which was why he was here now.

The kid was on his back on the ground and screaming at the top of his voice, tears pouring down his scrubby red cheeks as Miko tried to placate him. Her attempts weren't working too well.

The thing was, right now, _everyone_ was on edge; this was just Torran's way of letting his fears be known. And, unlike everyone else in the city, he wasn't even two years old.

If John had been allowed to throw a screaming tantrum, he wasn't sure he'd have passed up the opportunity.

John touched Miko's shoulder to gesture her away. Her expression was pathetically grateful. He crouched down by Torran, letting his fingers rest on the ground by the screaming boy. "Are you finished?" He asked the child curtly, much as he would have asked a rebellious subordinate.

The screaming subsided for a moment as Torran blinked at him through tear-glazed lashes and hiccuped. "Want mama!"

_So do I,_ John thought to himself, a lump rising in his throat. Instead, he said, "We'll go see mama, then. But," he added as the toddler scrambled up and flung himself against John, "say thank you to Miko and the scientists for looking after you. And apologise for disturbing them."

It came out more like, "_Dankymikascitisdory_," over John's shoulder, but he shrugged at Miko and smiled to relieve her anxious expression. She'd done as good a job as she knew, and even a mumbled, indistinct apology was better than nothing.

Plus, Torran had been locked up with several scientists who would give John a screaming fit after four hours, so he wasn't entirely unsympathetic.

"You caused them a lot of trouble," he told the kid as they walked out.

Torran hiccuped. "Mama."

"Yeah, well, Mama was busy before, but we're going to see her now." John hesitated, wondering how he was going to explain the situation to the boy. "But...you know how the doors locked and you were stuck with Miko for a long time?"

"Meh."

"Yeah. Well, the thing with the doors locking is that your mama got sick while the doors were shut and...and there wasn't anyone there to help her get better."

Torran stuck his hand in his mouth, but didn't say anything. John went on. "She's... sleeping and we're not sure..." He forced the words through the lump in his throat. "We're not sure when she's going to wake up. You can see her, but you have to be careful, okay?"

Dark eyes considered John, then nodded. "Mama hurt?"

"Yeah," he said huskily. "Mama's hurt. She's sleeping it off, though."

His heart had clenched when he and Ronon had reached Teyla's room.

For a moment, John hadn't been able to breathe, hadn't been able to think past the overwhelming sense of betrayal. Teyla had been lying on the bed with Kanaan curled up against her, his head tucked into the curve of her throat, his hand on her waist.

He'd been wrong. It wasn't him that Teyla had wanted after all.

Then Ronon had strode forward to the edge of the bed, and John realised that neither Teyla nor Kanaan were moving, and fear had propelled him forward, even though something inside him was bleeding.

Kanaan had been long dead, his body stiff with rigor mortis. Teyla had been barely breathing, her skin clammy but still warm, her pulse thready but there. Her top was torn and there was blood beneath her fingernails - matching the scrapes and scratches across Kanaan's face and arms.

At first, John thought the growl was Ronon's. It had taken him a moment to realise that the noise came from his throat.

She'd fought Kanaan. Whatever he'd been going to do to her, she hadn't been compliant.

Suddenly, John could breathe again. The evidence was still damning, but it wasn't conclusive. And Kanaan... What had gotten into the man? He could understand Kanaan being angry that Teyla had found someone else, but this?

"Don?"

The question broke him back into the present.

They were in the transporter.

John shook himself. He'd been too caught up in the memory of the moment when he'd realised what Kanaan had been trying to do to Teyla to realise that he'd walked into the transporter while on autopilot - the transporter that wasn't presently working since the city's power was out.

Torran had already levered himself up in John's arms to bat at the destination board, poking a finger at the destinations he'd seen Teyla or John prodding when they got into the transporter.

"I forgot," John told him. "It's not working because the lights are off. We'll have to walk."

The kid sat back and pouted. "I can walk."

"We've got a long way to go," John said as he took them out of the transporter and headed off down one of the corridors that would take them to the infirmary.

"I can walk!"

Afraid of a tantrum at a time when it would be unhelpful, John acquiesced.

In the end, Torran got to walk through the halls, but John picked him up for the stairs. And John was very glad that the earpieces weren't working either. It meant he didn't have Rodney demanding where was he and why wasn't he at the chair?

It meant a few minutes with a toddler who was holding tight to him with one damp hand and looking anxiously about him at the darkened city.

There were lights on in the infirmary - an oddly reassuring sight. The infirmary had its own naquadriah generator for when the main power went out, so the cooling fridges for the medicines, and the monitor systems were working. It looked like someone had hooked up some lights separate to the usual ceiling lights, and compared with the rest of the corridor, the place was bathed in a golden glow as people went about their business, shooting curious glances at John and smiling ones at Torran, but not interrupting them on their way to Teyla.

Carson was peering at a laptop. His expression was a little haggard, but it softened as he saw Torran and John.

"How're you doing?"

"Mama!"

Their eyes met over Torran's head and John saw that there hadn't been any change. He hadn't expected here to be any, but something in his chest tightened a little, even as Carson addressed Torran. "She's over here, laddie."

The last time John had been in here, the aides had just been laying Teyla out on the bed. Woolsey had called him up to the office to give and get the updates on what was happening around the city. Since then, they'd put her in an infirmary gown and attached a pulse monitor to the middle finger of her right hand. She lay with her hands by her sides, eyes closed, her head tilted slightly to one side. Sensor pads were positioned on her temples, and the wires ran out of sight around the back of the bed.

Before Torran came along, John had convinced himself that his gut reaction to Teyla injured or in distress was simply a natural protectiveness, brought on by the injury or helplessness of someone who he was used to seeing as strong.

Looking back, John could see how it had ripped a part of him out to step back during those nine months - to force himself to hold back and walk away, to not give into the temptation to be close.

Now, he swallowed the lump in his throat and stepped up to the side of the bed, jiggling Torran so the boy could see his mom.

"Mama?"

"Shh," he told Torran. "She's sleeping." It wasn't a good answer, but it would have to do.

"Mama!"

"Torran!" He raised his voice enough to get the kid's attention. "Mama's...sleeping. Deep sleep. She can't wake up."

"Sleep?" Torran struggled, trying to climb onto the bed.

"Be careful of the IV," Carson said, and John lifted the now-squealing boy.

"Stop that or...or..." John failed to come up with something suitably punitive.

"Want Mama!"

"You can sit by her if you don't disturb her," he told the boy. "Quietly, okay?"

Torran hung limp for a moment, then nodded. "Torran quiet."

And when John let him down on the bed, Torran wriggled his way in against Teyla's side and curled up next to her, his fingers still in his mouth.

Footsteps echoed faintly through the halls, and John leaned his elbows on the bed beside Teyla, exhausted. "How is she?"

"Physically, we think she's fine. Kanaan didn't... That is to say..." Carson hesitated. "There's nothing wrong with her from what we can determine. She's just...somewhere else."

John let his eyes linger on the familiar lines of cheek and jaw and brow, willing the dark lashes to lift, willing Teyla to look blurrily at him before asking him what he was staring at.

He let his fingers brush her forearm.

Staying wasn't an option. There was a crisis in the city and although he'd stolen the time now, he'd be needed elsewhere pretty soon. Rodney was probably grinding his teeth, and Woolsey would be sending someone to find him before long.

But Torran...

Torran was looking comfortable, snuggled up against Teyla's side, even if he seemed far more subdued than he'd been on the walk over here. John half-smiled, bittersweet, as the kid burrowed into Teyla's shoulder and looked hopefully up at her. It would be nice to lie down and curl up next to Teyla, with no concern other than whether she was going to wake up or not.

_You don't get to leave like this, Teyla,_ he thought, wondering if she could 'hear' him. _You survived everything else, so you're going to get through this._

"What's happening out there?" Carson asked gently, and John was only too glad to let his mind get caught up in the exigencies of their situation instead of spending time in morose and maudlin thoughts.

"Power's still off - Radek says the virus corrupted the subroutines that direct power from the ZPMs to the city functions. Rodney managed a burst of power to unlock all the doors, so we can move about the city, but other than that...everything's pretty much stuck as it is."

"And we don't know how it all happened? Other than it being the device..." Carson trailed off and glanced towards Teyla and Torran.

"No."

John's answer was terse. During the brief on Teyla's situation and Kanaan's death, Rodney had made the comment, "_Maybe Kanaan decided that boiling the bunny just wasn't enough and decided to boil the whole warren as well._"

More than a few eyes had rested on John at that moment, before Woolsey pointed out that Kanaan wouldn't have known of the change in Teyla's status. "_This was planned even before he returned to the city._"

And the question that nobody could answer was 'why'.

Kanaan hadn't made any good friends in Atlantis while he was there. After Teyla, the only person who could have said they knew him was Ronon, and he admitted that he hadn't known the man all that well - he could only say that from his experience, this wasn't anything he'd expected the man.

Right now, though, the 'why' mattered less than the 'what'. And the 'what' was looking pretty extensive.

"Well," Carson concluded, "Rodney's on it." He eyed John. "I guess you'll want to be getting back?"

He did. And he didn't. But it wasn't as though he had a choice. "Yeah."

"I can look after Torran for a while," Carson said quietly. "You'll need to send someone along from the kitchen with a bottle, though."

"Thanks." John went up to the side of the bed and caught Torran's eye. "Hey, little buddy. They need me upstairs, so you stay here with mom and Carson, okay?"

Torran pouted briefly, but nodded. "Don come back?"

"Yeah, I'll come back." It was terrifying to think this child needed him - that he was responsible for Torran.

"'Kay."

John squeezed the damp little hand that reached out to him, hesitated, then, hearing Carson's footsteps going out of the room, bent to kiss Torran on the head, and Teyla briefly on the lips.

"Be good," he told Torran, and headed out to work.

\--

"Well?"

Rodney had done something with one of the city connections so a direct audio line was possible between the control room and the chair room. It meant he could sit in the powered-up control room and harangue John while John sat in the chair.

"A minute, Rodney." John rolled his eyes at Radek, who shrugged. They were both accustomed to Rodney's drive and the impatience that came with it. In situations like this, everyone was tense and everyone's coping mechanisms were different - Rodney's was to jabber, rant, insult, and be snippy with everyone until he solved the problem, at which point he switched over to smug and self-satisfied.

"I can do what I did with the control room to give enough basic power for the chair," Radek told him, amidst a tangle of cables and a converter box. "But it will be very little and I would not advise trying to fly the city. It would seem that it is only small uses of power that the virus does not attack."

Which would be why Rodney's attempt to reboot the city power systems had opened the doors, only to promptly shut down again.

"So...don't overload the system?"

"Don't overload the system."

With a sigh, John let his mind sink into the city's awareness, into a state from which he could sense the city in its entirety. The idea was to use him as a detector to work out a starting point for what was happening to the city - a point of entry for them to begin work on getting Atlantis' systems back up.

It wasn't SOP, and John wasn't entirely comfortable with it.

Usually, when firing off the drones, or flying the city, John was in direct control of the city. It was no more than a 'jumper or an X-303 being told where to go, what to do.

This wasn't about control. In fact, the two times they'd tried this, the more control John tried to exert over the city, the less information he got from it.

He hated being passive.

_Desperate times,_ he told himself as he closed his eyes and let the city block everything else out.

John was always conscious of the city as a faint hum in his blood, a cellular 'white noise' that told him where he was, that welcomed him home. This was like easing himself into the midst of the hum, immersing himself in the constant ebb and flow of the city's strange consciousness so he could pick up every flutter and variation in the city.

A wisp of thought rose up from the hum. This was a bit like the meditation stuff Teyla had tried to take him through - except that he got stuck at the point where he was listening to the city's hum, not putting it behind him - as though it was a barrier he couldn't pass through to get to the next level - if there was a next level to be gotten.

Maybe, in spite of Teyla telling him that he simply wasn't concentrating, it was simply that this was as far as he was supposed to get. Maybe the trance which connected him with the city at a genetic level was all he would get while in a city that recognised him as one of her own.

_There._

Like an explosion through his senses, John felt his consciousness expand beyond his body, beyond the limits of his flesh, and the confines of the chair room.

For a moment, John felt like he was the city.

It was a bit like flying, if he thought about it. A series of instinctive responses and adjustments to the flow around him, except that the flow was the city's ethereal presence, not the currents and turbulence of air. There was even the familiar exhilaration, the familiar sense of freedom and release John got from flying.

John 'skimmed' across and through the workings of the city, looking for things that didn't fit, feeling for things that weren't right. He could sense the wrongness, but he couldn't work out what it was, where it was, what was needed to fix it.

Frustration tensed him, and with that tension came a brief resurgence of awareness of his body in the chair room.

"Has he found anything?"

"Not yet, Rodney." Radek's voice was patient.

Their voices were muted in the background of his mind, like sounds heard on the edge of sleep. But the 'sleep' was the humming swirl of Atlantis all around him, beckoning him in.

"Tell him to hurry up. We've just isolated a subspace signal coming from the city. We're broadcasting our position through the galaxy and we need to turn it off now!"

_Telling the Wraith where we are..._

And suddenly everything became urgent.

"Can't you temporarily power the system--?"

"Look, we've already tried it. Fifteen seconds and it powers down. What's he doing anyway?"

"Colonel?"

John was trying to get out of the trance.

On the two other occasions he'd done this, it had been as simple as a thought: _Let me out._

Then, the city had let him out, lifting him out as though on a wave rising up to the solid footing of the shore. This time, it barely stirred, lethargic against John's mind.

But something else moved. A grinding undertone rose beneath the hum of the city, as though something was waking from its sleep and clawing its way into consciousness, disrupting the city's flow.

Halfway between his body and the city, John felt the first stirrings of fear as something rasped past him, leaving an impression of sandpaper and ground glass. His mind felt raw, dangerously open to whatever was seeping into the city.

_Let me out,_ he told the city again, and this time felt it shiver, like a ripple through the sea.

And then whatever he'd sensed beneath the city's flow rose, no longer sleepy but awake and antagonistic. It came at him suddenly, a fire-bright slash of sharp edges, stabbing into his mind. And suddenly his world was broken glass and broken bones, raw flesh and gritty sand, and a pressure on his skin - or whatever passed for the sense of his skin - that pinched him into agony.

John screamed and the scream kept going.


	3. Chapter 3

**Interlude**

John was nearly asleep.

The TV was turned all the way down, so only the light flickered across John's face as he watched actors move across the screen, talking, laughing, gesticulating.

On his chest, Torran shifted and John froze. Tiny limbs moved, the sprawled toddler made a soft lip-smacking noise, turned his head, and went back to sleep.

John peered down at the beanie-encased head snoozing on his breastbone and sighed with relief. At nearly fifteen months, Torran was a sound sleeper - probably because he spent the rest of the day on his feet. And while he had a cadre of keepers in the city, the boy was clever and cunning - by the end of an hour, most people were glad to hand him off to someone else.

Getting him to sleep was a nightmare for just about everyone except John and Ronon - probably because they were the only two guys willing to let Torran fall asleep on top of them. According to the Law Of Torran, people made more comfy beds than actual beds.

Teyla was due back from a meeting in Woolsey with a representative from the IOA. There'd been a little trouble during Atlantis' brief sojourn to Earth when the IOA had been reluctant to allow the city - now considered Earth's best line of defence against a planetary attack - to return to Pegasus. The combined arguments of the SGC's highest and the new President's approval of Atlantis' return had swayed the balance.

What Earth had started in Pegasus, they would finish, said the President, although he'd warned them that they wouldn't be able to throw unlimited resources at it. _You've done well with what you have. But we haven't got anything more to give you, right now_.

Ronon hadn't exactly been happy with that pronouncement - coming from a society united by a single common enemy, he had no patience for warring factions. Knowing Earth and how the politics there worked, John was grateful they'd gotten even the permission to keep doing what they were doing. If the SGC and the IOA had been in agreement on the point that Earth owed Pegasus nothing, then they might very well have kept Atlantis on Earth and just sent Teyla and Ronon back.

Still, the IOA were now extremely suspicious of 'undue influence' on the workings of Earth, and had been grilling Teyla and Ronon - Teyla in particular.

Although it wasn't said, John knew perfectly well why the IOA had taken a sudden, sharp interest in her - for the same reason that he was lying on his back in the rec room with a toddler sleeping on his chest.

They hadn't said anything. Nobody had said anything. But John thought knew where this was going, however slowly, and he had no intention of changing direction. Not this time.

Teyla hadn't discouraged him, at least.

It wasn't the same as the earliest days - it couldn't be with Torran around. But in a way, it was better. John had made peace with his personal demons, and Teyla was making peace with hers.

Nine months gone, six of them without a word to say where Kanaan was. There was a point at which hope died, and Teyla seemed to have reached that point some months ago. John hadn't pushed, had tried to be as inconspicuously supportive as was possible for a guy in his situation.

Still, when they went to Athos to take Torran to visit her people, John never stepped through without wondering if a familiar and unwelcome face would be among those waiting for them at the other end.

So far, he'd been lucky.

Maybe someday he'd be unlucky, but until then, John was going to enjoy the friendship he'd almost forgotten he'd lost. And maybe try for the relationship he'd never had the courage to pursue.

But that was still only a possibility.

The doors hissed as they slid open, and he twisted his head around enough to see Teyla entering.

"You look very comfortable." Her mouth curved softly as she took the sofa-chair down by the feet-end of John's couch. Her voice was hushed to keep her son from waking, but John didn't think she needed to worry. Torran was making little bubbly noises in his nose, which meant he was pretty far gone - and that John would shortly have baby snot on his shirt. One of the hazards of child-minding for Teyla and why Rodney refused to touch Torran at all. "He was no trouble?"

"No more than usual. How was the meeting?"

Teyla hesitated, her eyes flicking to the TV screen and studying the episode that John wasn't actually watching. "They touched on something new today," she said after a careful moment. "Dr. Pickwise wished to know if we are in a sexual relationship."

_Oh._

"Yeah. I...probably should have warned you about that." It was harder for him to avoid looking at her - he was facing her, while she was facing the television, the changing light flaring colours off her profile. "They're going to assume we're sleeping together. It...kinda comes with the territory."

She glanced over at him, a wry smile touching her lips. "Yes, I recall Sergeant Bates was very suspicious."

Although Bates seemed to have mellowed since he'd returned to Earth. He'd even asked about Teyla when John had met him on Earth, done a double-take when told she was pregnant, and his eyes had instantly slid to John's face. It had almost been a pleasure to tell him that the father was one of Teyla's people and watch him look guiltily away - almost.

"You can tell them to back off." John kept his voice low, although he felt like he was vibrating with anger. "It's intrusive and none of their business."

He was going to have a word with Woolsey when he got the chance. Nobody from the IOA had so much as hinted at such a question to him yet. It was pretty underhanded to confront Teyla with the question first instead of coming to him.

"What?"

Teyla was watching him now, seeing more than he'd expected. "Your people are very...sensitive...about the nature of their relationships."

"Yeah, well...we like to know where we stand."

Although he'd avoided the question so far.

Then again, John reflected as he looked back down at Torran, he wanted to know where he stood, he just hadn't asked because he wasn't sure what the answer would be.

Silence tumbled down between them, broken only by the murmur of the television and the sound of Torran's bubbling-nose. Teyla tilted her head, apparently watching the show, a faint frown creasing her brow as she tried to work out what was happening in the final few minutes of the episode.

John watched a few scenes, then let his gaze drift back to her.

He wanted to ask, "_What did you tell them_?"

But the internal censors regulating inane stupidity had a good hold of his tongue, and he looked down at the toddler lying on his chest.

She'd have told them the truth, of course. Which was that they were friends. Just friends.

"John?"

He jerked, then froze as Torran shifted. On the television, the show had ended and the credits were scrolling up the screen. A moment later, Torran's weight lifted from John's chest, leaving a cold patch. Small arms fastened around Teyla's neck as she jiggled him into position, but it seemed that even just the sense of 'mama' was enough to reassure Torran and the long lashes never lifted from the big dark eyes.

John swivelled his legs off the edge of the sofa cushion and stood. The world tilted. One hand came down on the sofa arm, the other flailed out, and Teyla grabbed it in hers. Their fingers meshed, a solid connection.

"You are okay?"

He took a moment to let the dizziness wear off, then let go of her hand. Her fingers were cool against his, but the touch felt like a brand. "Got up too fast," he said, dragging his fingers through his hair. "Thanks."

Her mouth tilted at one corner, wide and warm. "Thank you for keeping Torran."

John shrugged. "I said I'd help." It hadn't been easy, but he'd kept his promise to her, and she'd kept hers to him. There'd been no more talk about leaving the city or giving up the fight, nothing that suggested she wanted to go back to her people.

Now, Teyla seemed content.

Watching her shift Torran to her hip, John hoped he could be. One hand rose to brush the back of the downy head, and he kept his eyes on the sleeping face still soft with baby fat. This was as close as he was allowed to come; to touch, but not to hold. John had made his choice when he never moved on his feelings for her and Teyla had chosen someone else.

Life was a bitch, and sometimes she had puppies.

But Kanaan had gone away, and John could dream for a little while. He'd wake up someday, but it would be good for as long as it lasted.

The fingers at his jaw surprised him, he turned his head and began to ask a question that fell silent as his lips brushed Teyla's.

It wasn't intentional. He felt her surprise in the way her lips stilled about the words she'd been about to say, in the sudden tension in the fingers against his jaw. He felt her interest in the way she tasted of uncertainty and indecision, and the faintest hint of oolong. But John moved his mouth gently against hers, closing his eyes to savour the feel of her - no force, no coercion, just an invitation for her to see him as more than a friend.

When she pulled back, he supposed he had his answer. Her gaze was steady, but her expression was troubled. "John?"

"I... It's okay, Teyla." He forced himself to smile, prepared to take the step back. "I know... I didn't mean..."

Her thumb across his lips silenced him, pity and exasperation in her face.

When she lifted her mouth to his, it was John's turn to be surprised.

He didn't let his surprise last very long.

His fingers slid through the tendrils at her nape, cupping her head in one hand as he tilted his mouth to explore the angles of the kiss, the shape of her lips, the taste of her tongue. His heart was thrumming in his chest, like it wanted to shake his body apart at the seams.

John leaned in, felt her smile, and leaned in further.

They'd have to talk about this later - when they'd finished kissing each other, when Torran had been put to bed, when they had a moment to ask what this meant. John knew where he wanted this to go; but he wanted to know that Teyla wanted it, too.

But right now, in the twilight, with Teyla's mouth in his, and Torran's head cradled in his hand, John figured talking could wait.

\--

**Chapter Three**

 

Her temples throbbed to the beat of her heart - a steady pounding so loud, Teyla could hear screaming in her head.

Oh. Wait. That was her son.

Consciousness flared, like a firelighter in the dark of a cave. John. Kanaan. Michael. Torran.

_Torran._

"Torran!"

She had vision to see only one thing clearly - her son running over to her bedside, nearly tripping over his small feet. Hands lifted him up to the bed, and he half-fell, half-lunged to Teyla's arms.

She accepted the pain of his weight in exchange for the pleasure of his liveliness.

Her eyes closed as she breathed an old prayer of gratefulness to the Ancestors. Perhaps they did not watch over her as she had once believed, but she needed to be thankful for her son's life, and the Ancestors were as reasonable a recipient as any.

His fear resonated so strongly inside her - the darkness, her absence, then her silence, and John's leaving. Torran was too young to remember Kanaan's departure consciously, but he'd felt her loneliness in the time between when she'd been left in the city and before John had made an effort to become involved.

Teyla felt his breathless terror at being left alone again, and struggled to disentangle herself from her son's emotions. He was alive and she was alive. She had achieved that much against...

"Michael."

She looked up at the circle of faces around her bedside, their expressions changing from relieved to anxious at her words.

Yet, it was not the concern of those aware of a great danger, but the concern of those worried about her. Jennifer was the first to speak. "He's dead, Teyla. He's been dead for months..."

They did not understand. Perhaps they thought her delirious or forgetful in her unconsciousness. She was no longer in her darkened rooms, but in the infirmary. Yet the lighting was low, and the mood of those around her was subdued.

_It was nothing too difficult to arrange, even with their pitiful precautions._

She had seen what he had done to the city through the lens of his mind - his twisted intent, to make of Atlantis what Atlantis had made of him.

Teyla shook her head slightly as Carson stepped in to check the numbers on her bedside machine.

"I am not misremembering. Michael is responsible for what has happened to the city. He--" Abruptly, she recalled herself to her son's weight in her arms, and knew she could not say what had been done to Kanaan - not now.

"Teyla..."

Teyla saw the look they exchanged, a frowning question as to whether she was sun-touched. She swallowed and forced herself to composure. "How long has the city been like this?"

"Six hours," said Jennifer, her expression tight and tired. "Teyla, about Kanaan..."

"He is dead. I know." But she could not spare the time to grieve - not now. Atlantis was in more danger than they had thought or imagined. "Where is Rodney?"

"In the control room, fretting himself to a shred," said Carson dryly. "As has this little one."

"Mama!" Torran declared. "Torran good. Don sick."

Teyla froze, her hands tightening around her son's back. "John is sick?"

The look that passed between them this time was a warning. Teyla recognised it as the forerunner of news they feared would trouble her, and would try to mitigate.

"Carson."

"Rodney suggested using the chair to find out what was wrong with the city," Carson began.

"Colonel Sheppard went in...but he didn't come out."

Fear stung her, cold and bitter. Their expressions did not indicate death, but their news was not all good, either. "Did not come out?"

"According to Radek, he went into a trance state while in the chair and then fell unconscious. They tried reviving him, but..."

The chair was not commonly used unless the city was threatened. Teyla sat up, sudden fear sliding through her. "Are we under attack?"

In her mind, she saw the city as a bright light, a pulsing beacon in a fluid world of half-light connections, information flowing around her in integrated consciousness. And she felt the answer, even before Jennifer answered.

"No. Not exactly. We're not sure of the details, right now-- Oh, no." Her hand came down on Teyla's shoulder. "You're not going anywhere, Teyla."

She'd begun to ease herself up into a sitting position, gently shifting Torran in her lap, but the glares being levelled at her by both Carson and Jennifer suggested that they were not going to make what she had to do, easy.

"I must. I know what is happening."

"You've been out of it for the last six hours, Teyla. Rodney's got it under control. They've already fixed the communications in the city..."

"And yet it is dark in the room beyond." She regretted even that slight snap when Jennifer looked hurt. Yet that did not stop the urgency of her mission.

Perhaps they would be more sympathetic if she started with something they would understood? Once she had that much, she could push her limits. "May I at least see John?"

"He's still in the chair," said Carson, collapsing her hopes like a badly-erected tent. "We've hooked him up to monitors for the moment - I only came back to exchange some files. But you shouldn't be going anywhere, love."

"You need to rest - you've...you were comatose when they brought you in, and you've been unconscious for hours..."

"Teyla?" Ronon strode in, and Teyla could have laughed with relief. At last, an unequivocal ally she could use!

"Ronon. Michael is behind this."

Ronon blinked, but it only took him a moment to realign his thinking - a Runner thought on his feet or failed to survive. "The device was his?"

"Yes. He...he planned for...for it to be brought to Atlantis, planned that it should take over our systems, leave us open to his attack."

"Is he on his way?"

She shook her head, not trusting control of her voice. Michael was dead; but that did not mean his plans were ended. He had always taken the long view - in that, his cunning had outstripped Atlantis'.

Both Carson and Jennifer were staring at her. "How do you know this?"

She could not divulge Kanaan's role in it - nor Michael's deception. That was still too raw for explaining, too sensitive to relate - especially where her son might hear. Later, she would tell them the details. Later, she would ask after the body, would bury it as though the man who'd worn it had been the man who'd loved her, not the creature who'd turned her into a symbol of his obsession.

Ronon's hand was already at his earpiece, and a moment later, they could all hear Rodney's outrage at being interrupted. "Teyla's awake. She says this is Michael's doing."

"The device began to take over Atlantis' systems the instant it passed into the city," she said, picking up what she had gleaned from Michael's thoughts during her struggle with him. "It did not need connection to begin with - only an initial draw of power from the Stargate."

There was a pause on the other end of Ronon's conversation, then a snapped question.

"Kanaan told me." It was a lie, yes, but one that would cut through the complexity of explanation.

"Teyla--"

"I know he is dead," she said, and felt her throat clog. "Please. I must talk with Rodney."

Without a word, Ronon unhooked his earpiece and handed it to Teyla. She took it with relief and fitted it to her ear. "Rodney, this is Teyla."

"Look, we've got a crisis in the city--"

"You have been locked out of the city's systems," she said. "I know. It will have allowed you the appearance of access, only to deny you shortly after. And when you attempt to break in, the accesses shift."

"Yes. That's exactly-- How did you know that?"

Explanations would take too much time. "There is a backdoor, but I require access to the system."

"Well, you're not going to get it from there," said Rodney. "Teyla, what's going on?"

She swallowed. The long story was too long, and the short would not be enough for Rodney. "It is complicated, Rodney."

On the other end of her earpiece, there was a moment of digestion.

"Teyla, are you _sure_ about this? We don't have time to humour your delusions of grandeur, you know."

From anyone else, it would have been an insult. From Rodney, it was just...Rodney. "I am sure," she said and began to ease Torran out of her arms so she could get up. Naturally, he began wailing, clinging to her as though she would vanish.

"Oh, God, you're not going to bring him along with you! We've got to _work_ around here, Teyla!"

Jennifer tried to take Torran from her arms, and he only wailed louder. Teyla shook her head and kept him in her arms with a sigh.

"He will be quiet, Rodney. I promise." Torran was simply tired and stressed. As were they all. "I will be there shortly."

She was tempted to add, _If you can be patient,_ but resisted. The safety of the city was more important than any petty retort she wanted to make.

Easing off the bed with her son still clinging to her, Teyla grimaced as the edges of the hospital gown gaped.

"Not exactly fashionable, is it?" Carson asked with a slight smile that faded after a moment. "Okay, I'm making you a bargain, Teyla. You're going to the control room, but you're going to be wheeled along in a chair."

"By Ronon," added Jennifer with a stern look at Ronon. "Who knows what's going to happen if he doesn't look after you."

Ronon grinned and shrugged as Teyla juggled Torran over to her hip and handed back his earpiece. "You're up to this?"

She nodded, although she wanted nothing more than a good rest. It had been a long day for her, too - from seeking out John on New Athos early this morning, to the journey back to her body and the city. She had known missions-gone-wrong that were less exhausting than today.

Carson left with them, on his way back to the chair room, leaving Jennifer in charge of the infirmary.

"How is he?" Teyla asked softly as Ronon wheeled her along. Torran sat happily in her lap, watching the world sail by with infant glee.

The hesitation told her more than Carson's reply. "He's a stubborn man. He'll make it out okay. We're trying everything we can to rouse him out of it..."

She swallowed hard and nodded. "Thank you."

"He's important to us, too." And with one of his slight, wry smiles, Carson headed off down the corridor towards the chair room.

Teyla said nothing until he was out of earshot. "How is he, really?"

"It's bad," Ronon said, his deep voice quiet and grim. "Radek said he screamed at the start and struggled. Then he collapsed. They tried to take him out of the chair but he went into convulsions, so they put him back on and monitored him from there."

"What happened?"

"He was trying to 'read' the city. Like what you can do with a hiveship." Ronon only paused a moment - barely long enough for Teyla to process that John had been trying to communicate with Atlantis. "What happened with Kanaan?"

The question took her by surprise. It should not have done so. The facile half-truths she could present to the Lanteans were evident half-lies to someone more adept at reading her.

"It was Michael," she said softly, and her fingers traced her son's cheek. "He transferred his mind into a clone of Kanaan's body to get into Atlantis."

Ronon was silent for a while, moving them through the quiet corridors of the city. Then. "You killed him?"

"Yes."

"Good."

It was a simple, quiet exchange, and it needed nothing more. Ronon understood everything that she had left unsaid.

They reached the control room soon enough that Torran was still excited by the wheeled trip through the city's corridors, but clearly far later than Rodney had expected. He was scowling at Mr. Woolsey from behind a computer as they came out into the gateroom, and the tone of his voice had been quite clear even further back along the corridor.

"...like a shell's been put around the city systems. When we try to break the shell, it develops new layers - ones that our cracking programs can't adjust to."

"Haven't we seen this before in the Replicators? Learning systems?"

"Well, yes. But our way of dealing with it then was to get them the first time! In case you haven't noticed--"

"Strangely, Dr. McKay, I have noticed," said Mr. Woolsey with a hint of impatience as they climbed the stairs from the darkened gateroom and into the well-lit control room. "Teyla, Ronon."

Rodney glared at his computer screen, not even lifting his gaze to greet them. "Took you long enough," he grumbled although Teyla saw the slight easing of his hunch that suggested he was glad to see them.

Around the room, other technicians clustered around a handful of computers. Most glanced up as they came in, but few stopped their work. Teyla saw Amelia glance up with a quick, warm smile for her and Ronon before she returned to pointing out something on her screen to the two women watching over her shoulder.

"What's going on?" Ronon asked, bending down to swing Torran up in his arms.

"What do you think? They're trying to get the system," said Rodney, his fingers flashing speedily across the keyboard. "Not that they're getting very far."

The grim expression he turned on the computer screen suggested he wasn't getting very far either.

Mr. Woolsey frowned briefly at him, then turned to Teyla. "Teyla, you think you can fix this?"

She could. She knew what Michael had done, knew how to combat it. But she could not do it all - that was beyond her. Her understanding of the city's systems was better than many of the military personnel, but she did not have the time to practise what she knew the way Rodney or the control room technicians often did.

"How'd you know all this anyway? And how'd the virus - or whatever it is that's keeping us out - get onto our systems? I mean, I loaded it onto a standalone, not onto the network..."

"We have a wireless network in the city, Rodney."

"Yes, but it requires a protocol key..." He trailed off, realisation widening his eyes as his lightning-quick mind made the connections through logical outcomes.

At least he had the tact not to blurt it out.

Kanaan had possessed the knowledge of the protocol key from his time in the city. He had learned to use the Atlantis network - perhaps not with the facility that Teyla had learned in her time here, but then, he had never been wholly comfortable with the technology she had grown to understand.

"It was not willingly given," she said quietly, moving around the console and indicating the computer behind which Chuck was sitting. "May I?"

The young technician half-lifted his hands in a 'go ahead' gesture. "If you can get in, go for it," he said, scooting backwards and giving her access. "We've been trying to get in - without success, I might add."

"We've been successful!" Rodney protested.

"We haven't gotten through!"

With her wrists resting on the computer's edge, Teyla opened one of the text editor programs. Carefully, she began picking out commands that she had stripped from Michael's thoughts - the fragments of code he had put together to block the Lanteans from the system, and the means by which he had intended to gain control of what he had done.

"Teyla?" Mr. Woolsey peered over the console. "Are you certain you can get in?" The overhead lights reflected off his glasses, making his gaze opaque and a little disconcerting.

"Yes," she began, continuing to pick out the letters one by one.

"And you didn't answer my question about how you know all this," Rodney added.

"If she can do it, why ask questions?"

Heads turned to look at Ronon, jiggling Torran over by the balcony. One of his dreadlocks was being utilised as a chew toy, and Teyla's warning, "Torran," earned her what she was sure would become an 'I wasn't doing anything, Mama' expression in years to come.

"Because she might make things worse?"

"You do that all the time."

"I make things better!"

"But sometimes you make them worse, first."

"I do not!"

"Yes, you do."

"Do not!"

Mr. Woolsey intervened before it could descend into the childish back-and-forth. "Perhaps we could argue who does what _after_ we've restored control of the city?"

It was something that John might have said if he had been here to mediate. Teyla forced back the clutch of fear in her chest as she continued typing out the lines of code. John was in good hands - Carson would do everything in his power to keep him alive. All Teyla must do was buy time.

Beneath the repressive gaze of the city's administrator, Rodney pulled himself together, shot Ronon a ferocious glare which was met by a wolfish grin, and peered at Teyla's screen. "Huh. That looks...reasonable."

There was a snort from over her shoulder. Chuck had apparently been watching her painstaking typing. Now he leaned across to indicate the lines of code Teyla had written. "It looks like a login script, McKay. See the syntax? That would be the command frame for the login, this is the protocol structure, and that's probably the password string that allow the program entry. Right, Teyla?"

She thought understood most of what he had said; but much of the detail of what she had just done had been gleaned from Michael's mind. It took her a moment to respond. "I believe so. Rodney, are you ready to take control of the city."

"What? Yes, of course-- Wait! At what point are we talking about control of the city? At the operating system level, or the applications level?"

Teyla stared at him. "I do not know that."

"So you can get into the system, but once you're there, you don't even know--?"

"Rodney, I can get you access to the system," she told him, her voice growing sharp with weariness and stress. "Is that not enough?"

"Not if I don't know which level I'm supposed to be trying to control it--!"

Again, it was left to Mr. Woolsey to interrupt. "Why don't we just assume that we're looking at the easiest level to operate?"

"That would be the operating system level," said Chuck. "There'd be little point in creating a trojan horse to hand over control at an applications level if someone else still controls the operating system."

Teyla finished the last few lines of the program, and saved it to the computer's drive. Then she opened up the command prompt and typed in the execution line. Her heart was in her throat - was she sure of this? To fail would be demoralising for them all, and Rodney was right - this was not her usual area of knowledge.

Yet she knew she was the only one who could do this. Perhaps this was not her usual area, but that did not mean she could not try.

"Rodney? The window is narrow during which it will ask you to give it a code."

"Any code? Six characters, minimum one capital and one alphanu-- All right, all right, I'm ready." He rolled his eyes and muttered about small pleasures. "Okay, Teyla, hit it."

She 'hit it'.

A moment later, Teyla rolled back her chair, leaving Rodney access to the laptop on which she'd been working. His fingers flashed across the keyboard as the prompts displayed themselves, and a moment later, the city was his to control.

"Okay, so we've got the ZPM access...unlocked. Power...unlocked." Down in the Gateroom, the lights came on.

"Gate control systems...unlocked." Behind Teyla, the sudden patter of dozens of hands on keyboards betrayed the resumed access to the city. The technicians began exchanging status updates, and Teyla moved out of Chuck's way so he could reach Rodney's computer, then went to take Torran from Ronon's arms.

"Communications...rerouted..."

"Ligh!" Torran told her as he scrambled into her arms, pointing up at the gateroom lights. Ronon grimaced faintly as he inspected the heavily-damp end of his dreadlock, then tossed it back over his shoulder.

"City systems-"

"_What's going on up there?_" Carson's voice suddenly cut through their earpieces. Teyla's heart leapt in her breast, pounding at the cage of her chest, as though it could burst free of her pain. "_Hold him down! Alice, don't let him bite his tongue--_"

Mr. Woolsey was swiftest to reach his earpiece, his hands unburdened by children or computer keyboards. "Dr. Beckett?"

"_The lights came up and Sheppard went into convulsions - did you get the system back_?"

"Dr. McKay's working on it now." Mr. Woolsey turned to Teyla. "Shouldn't the system have let him out if you opened it up?"

"It should." Teyla felt cold fear clutch at her heart, pressed her cheek to the top of her son's head. "I do not know why--"

Rodney was still typing. "What kind of convulsions?"

"_Like an epileptic fit. Blood pressure's up. His EEG's gone wild. Whatever you're doing to the city is affecting him. You've got to stop it._"

"We can't-- The city's still sending a signal out--" Rodney hesitated, and his eyes flickered from Teyla to Ronon, his expression desperate. "We can't."

Mr. Woolsey looked grim. "How bad is it?"

"_He's going into fibrillation..._" Through the earpiece, she could hear grunting and thrashing, urgent voices, and the irregular beep of the heart monitor as it marked the beat of John's heart.

"What's happening?" Ronon asked, urgently. Teyla glanced up at him - she still had his earpiece, he had gone without until now.

"Cardiac arrest," said Rodney. "We can't bring up the city--"

Mr. Woolsey grimaced. "Dr. McKay, the city is sending out a signal to anyone who has the technology to read it. Including the Wraith. We can't afford to let the Wraith know our position--"

In Teyla's ear, Carson was calling for the defibrillator. Beneath his orders, she could hear people moving with hurried concern, their voices little more than the rising and falling tones, but their meaning as clear as the morning dew on a _tava_ crop.

She could barely breathe. So soon after the realisation that she had lost Kanaan, must she lose John as well? It burned within her, guilt and anguish and anger and regret. She had let herself be deceived by Michael, and all of Atlantis was paying the price for it.

"Mama?" Torran patted her cheek with a damp hand, his expression anxious. And Teyla realised Rodney was looking at her. So was Mr. Woolsey and Ronon, and the eyes of the technicians lifted briefly from their computer screens to rest on her face asking one thing of her.

"Teyla?"

John's life or Atlantis? She had made the choice once before; she had not thought she would ever have to make it again. Others had made the choice of Atlantis over an individual life, too. It was not the first time.

And yet the question was left to her?

Was it because of the relationship between them? She was not the only one who loved John, cared for him. She would not be the only one to suffer for the loss of him.

"Take the city back, Rodney." Her voice was steady. It was not truly a choice. John would not condone his life over Atlantis' survival. He would not forgive them for saving him at the cost of the city.

"But--"

"I cannot bring the shells down again," she said, her eyes stinging . "It was designed to be opened once, and then sealed. Michael would not have hesitated."

And yet Rodney did. Understandably, but dangerously.

"If we miss this opportunity, we may not get Atlantis back."

In her earpiece, the sounds of Carson's people grew more frantic.

"..._losing him_..."

"..._10mL of epinephrine_..."

"..._might have to switch to CPR_..."

Their desperation was cold as despair; the expectation she could feel in the eyes of the Control room personnel was a burden Teyla didn't want. Even Mr. Woolsey seemed to be hesitating over the call, his expression hesitant behind his heavy-rimmed glasses.

_Did you want to tell the others?_ John had asked that first morning as he sat down beside her on the bed, freshly showered and damply delicious.

Distracted, Teyla had been surprised by the query. _Will they not find out?_ Then his meaning sank in. _You wish to keep this a secret?_

_No_, John had said, immediately. Then he'd hesitated, looking down at his hands. _But you might._

She had curled her fingers into his hair, damp drops sliding between her knuckles as she kissed him, slow and sensuous, until he had no breath left in him. And when they parted, dragging air between their lips, she had told him, _I have lived in the space between what is personal and what is important all my life, John. It does not matter to me._

He'd studied her face for a long moment, his gaze steady on her, as though he sought reassurance in her eyes. _Then I don't want to keep this under the radar._

In their time together, John had never said the words _I love you_. Teyla had never expected them from him, and would have been alarmed had he voiced any such sentiment. It was only in time that she had realised that the admission, in John's own way, had been powerful as any declaration.

He would not hide their relationship; he would not draw the all-important line between what the Lanteans saw as personal and professional. She was important to him on both levels, and he would not pretend otherwise.

And she had told him the truth: her love for John was personal, yes, but it was not more important than Atlantis.

She looked at Rodney and felt tears sting her eyes. "Do it."

Her will did not waver, and neither did her voice. Yet the others seemed almost shocked. Resigned to the inevitable, perhaps, yet shocked - another contradiction of the Lantean way. Their spoken beliefs tended one way, but their unspoken expectations tended another.

At this moment, Teyla could not care who blamed her. This was the right thing to do.

"She's right. We need control of the city." The support from Ronon was unexpected and yet should not have been. They had learned expedience at the hands of the Wraith; they knew what it meant to sacrifice for the good of the whole.

"John would want it." The words felt like sawdust out of her mouth, but she got them out.

"He'd order you to do it himself."

Rodney swallowed and looked down at his hands. "Not that he could order me," he said hoarsely. "Seeing as I'm not military." But his fingers moved across the keyboard, and Teyla forced herself to watch as his hand hovered over the 'Enter' key.

"Do it."

The tap of one key echoed through the Control room and the screens above the Control room flashed into life. A moment later, the technicians were back at their desks, running system diagnostics and passing comments through the room. Teyla stood, relinquishing the station back to Chuck, but her eyes fixed on blank air, and in her mind, she saw John's body arch with a scream that crackled Ronon's borrowed earpiece.

Rodney hunched over his laptop, his head in his hands, and she could feel Ronon's eyes on her as Carson's voice grew ragged in her ear. "_We're losing him. Keep the oxygen on and we'll go to CPR_."

Teyla closed her eyes against the tears that stung them, and pressed her lips to her son's head. _I am sorry, John._

In her ears, the fight for John's life went on.


	4. Chapter 4

**Interlude**

Teyla came awake with a gasp.

Beside her, John made a noise that he would certainly deny was an interrupted snore and half-reared out of bed in the darkness before dawn, reaching for a weapon that was halfway across the room along with his discarded trousers. "What is it?"

Her breath was short as she took stock of her surroundings - the calm Atlantis night, sea-washed with salt scent, the cool evening air against her bare shoulders, the soft burbling noises of her son's infant snores, and the man whose shadow held the stillness of a wary fighter, dragged from sleep, startled by the panic of someone he trusted.

"Nothing," she managed after a moment, although her heart was still pounding in her breast. "A bad dream."

She had dreamed of darkness, of pain, of grief - of bitter months of emptiness and solitude, of waking up to find herself deserted and alone. And in the final moments of her dream, Teyla had found herself reaching for someone who wasn't there.

John was.

He'd stayed earlier tonight, after carrying Torran back from the mess hall where her son had fallen asleep during an evening with the knitting 'stitch and bitch' group. Teyla had watched his fingers linger on the crown of her son's head as they put Torran to sleep, and thought about drawing those fingers over her lips, over her skin, before putting thought to action.

One thing had led to another, and when she had sleepily invited John to stay afterwards, he had curled up behind her without a word, his body cradling hers as his lips brushed her throat.

Now he stayed sitting up, as she eased herself back down among the furs, his head half-lifted as though listening for something.

"What is it?"

He glanced at her, then away. "I should probably head back to my own rooms."

Teyla looked at the line of his bare back as he swung his legs from the bed, a little bewildered by the abrupt rejection. John had always been a private man, even at the most personal of times, and in their long friendship Teyla had learned to see that of which he would not speak.

In the last few months as they had negotiated the new layers of their relationship, she was beginning to realise how deep his hurts ran - deeper than she had supposed.

"It can be difficult sleeping in an unfamiliar bed. Or with an unfamiliar partner," she said after a moment.

One of his hands reached up to rub at the back of his neck. "Yeah," he said softly. "Look, Teyla, about this..."

She let him stutter into silence, waiting a few moments to see if he would continue his sentence. Then she reached out and touched his shoulder, wondering at the hot skin sheathing hard muscle. "I am happy to take things slowly."

He turned towards her, and the pale glow of light streaming in the window beyond him made a silhouette of his face and a mystery of his expression. "Are you sure you want to take this anywhere at all?"

Teyla looked at him for a moment, trying to divine his thoughts and feelings. There had always been times when he had bewildered her with his actions and behaviour, or frustrated her with assumptions she did not share. And yet there was a part of him that came forward like a hesitant child, clinging to a hope that his offering might be acceptable.

"If I was not sure, you would not be sleeping here," she said after a moment. "John, if you do not want this--"

"It's not that." He looked down, and although his face was in shadow, she knew that his eyes had darted to her face before turning away. "I want you to be sure."

It took her a moment to realise what he was saying beneath his words and when it did, she stared up into his face and wondered if he knew her at all. Or was it simply his own insecurities speaking to him with the voices of his history?

"I am sure."

The words were simple for her; she had loved in her lifetime, and she would not regret it - whether this relationship between them now, or her care for Kanaan, or the other men with whom she had shared her body and her bed in the past.

She reached over the bed for his hand, felt him turn his palm to meet hers. The tension in his shoulders relaxed as she tugged him back into the bed, and he came hesitantly, yet with a betraying eagerness when their mouths met and his hand strayed to her breast.

If some aspects of their developing relationship were complicated and fraught with pitfalls, other aspects were simple enough.

The essentials of sex were a language that needed only minimal translation from Athos to Earth, and if he seemed to expect her to fit herself to him more often than not, Teyla had noted that he was growing more willing to fit himself to her, to pace himself to her pleasure.

She had no quarrel with that.

Although Torran protested towards the end of it, a rising wail of displeasure at having his sleep interrupted. Beneath her thighs, John froze, although there was a thread of laughter beneath his groan. "Do you want to--"

"Keep. Going." Teyla was not minded to be patient with his Lantean prudishness - not when she was this close to orgasm. "John..." Her warning vanished into his mouth when he wasn't as fast to kiss her back as she desired and he applied himself to her pleasure with all the ardency she required of him.

"You know, I think there's a law against this somewhere," he said afterwards, when their breaths were still coming in pants and their hearts were still pounding. His palms smoothed damply over the skin of her buttocks, and for a moment, Teyla wasn't sure what he referred to - a law against intimacy? Then he gestured towards Torran's cot and elaborated. "Corruption of minors."

_Ah_. Teyla laughed, and licked a droplet of sweat from his throat. "My people live in tents, John. And he is not yet two. He is not likely to remember."

"_I'll_ remember," muttered John into her nape, making her laugh again. "He's staring at us from his cot, Teyla..."

She found his prudishness amusing, especially since Torran was quite happily bouncing on his mattress, trying to reach the 'hanging mobile' that twirled pastel-coloured animals from Earth just beyond his reach. Still, he would need laying down and putting to sleep before they would get any rest themselves.

John wiped her down, kissed her, and went into the bathroom as she went to see if she could get her wakeful son to sleep.

When John came back from the bathroom, Torran was lying back down, sucking on his fist as Teyla sang him a lullabye about sailing on a river that ran to the end of the world and beyond. It was a metaphor for the Ring of the Ancestors, and one which her mother had sung to her when she was a child.

Maybe someday Torran would sing it to his own children as Kanaan could not.

Surely he was dead by now, so long gone and so long silent. News could travel fast in Pegasus, and messages were sent through trading allies - for what people knew when their own loved ones would be trying to send a message back?

And even if he were alive, he had been gone more than long enough for a lover in Pegasus to move on. Athosians did not expect forever, just today.

She wondered if John understood that. The Lanteans were romantic in ways that Teyla had always found touching, and which she envied a little. Athosian life was too short to want 'forever' - 'now' had always been good enough.

Then John came over to the cot and rested his arms on the other side, a funny little smile touching his face and softening the more haunted shadows in his eyes as Teyla sang her son to sleep.

Whether this was just for a little while, or for as much 'forever' as they had, Teyla had chosen.

\--

**Chapter Four**

 

There were corkscrews twisting in his flesh. Worms twisting in his mind, gnawing at his thoughts. He writhed helplessly, every cell shuddering as his body struggled against the pain. Colours flashed before his eyes, exploding circles of pain as his body fought and fought and fought but there was no surcease.

Unconsciousness would have been bliss, but it was like he couldn't find the shutdown switch.

John felt like he was going mad, assaulted with every sense, needles stabbing all over his skin and beneath it, his body screaming at him as his throat worked to disperse the agony with his voice.

It was some time before he realised he couldn't feel anything beyond his body. Not the chair beneath his thighs and back, not the city in his mind, not the presence of the others who'd been in the chair room.

He was alone with his pain.

"You're making it harder on yourself, John."

Maybe not quite alone.

Surprise jerked him out of the immediacy of pain. He panted against a misty white surface that felt solid under his fingers, but which didn't press against his skin like any floor he'd ever trodden on, and didn't bother looking up at the man whose black business shoes shone in the misty whiteness.

"Yeah, well, you always said it was your way or the hard way."

Above him, his father made a huffing noise. "That's 'my way or the _high_way,' John. And get off the floor."

"It's not a floor." With more than a little annoyance, John realised he sounded fifteen again. Which had probably been the last time he and his father had conversed this civilly without either Dave or Nancy running interference.

"Whatever it is, you can damn well get off it and look at me when I'm speaking to you!"

Yeah, that was his father, all right.

John took his time getting up, as much out of spite as because his body still hurt. The immediacy was gone, although he could still feel the pain pounding at him beyond the pale - as though the whiteness in which he stood was merely insulation, not an actuall wall.

The fawn-coloured trenchcoat was familiar, as was the business suit, and the impatient look over the corporate tie. Patrick Sheppard had always hated being kept waiting - which was probably why John had always dawdled. "Did that to spite me, didn't you?"

"When haven't I?" John rolled his shoulders with a grimace at the stabbing pain the slight movement induced. "What are you doing here? Where the hell is here, anyway?"

"Your mother would have a fit if she heard your language."

"Yeah, well, she's not here." Suddenly, John wished she was. If he could have chosen either of his parents to be here, he would have picked his mom, who mightn't have always understood him, but had always supported him. "What are you doing here?"

Broad shoulders shrugged. "Come to see how you were doing, seeing as you couldn't even come to see me when you left the goddamned planet."

"You weren't talking to me."

"You were throwing away your life!"

"It was my life!" John forced the old resentments back and away, the same way he'd forced the pain away. Now wasn't the time for them. The city - _his_ city - was in danger, and he was caught here - trapped with his father.

Or, maybe John was dead and this was hell. Because he figured that an eternity of listening to Patrick Sheppard's litany of John's failures was right up hell's alley.

He stumbled to his feet, and gritted his teeth as his feet was sliced by ghostly knives. He could see his boots, whole and solid, but his body was telling him that it was being sliced to bits.

A shudder racked him, and was swiftly stifled. No weakness should ever be shown in front of his father.

"Yeah, well... Looks like you found yourself another life to live," his father said, with an edge to his voice. "Nice city, lovely people, another galaxy...and even a woman to share it with."

Oh yeah, this was hell.

"Leave Teyla out of this," he said. He kept his voice even, although anger was heating his nape and his ears. "She's got nothing to do with you."

"Hardly, since she's got everything to do with you."

"Throwing myself away again?"

"You could do better."

It wasn't even said with heat. There was no passion to his father's dismissal, only the observation that Teyla Emmagan wasn't good enough for the son of Patrick Sheppard.

Bitter amusement bubbled up in his throat as he imagined Dave's reaction if he'd turned up to his father's funeral with Teyla in tow. _That_ would have set the tongues wagging.

"Depends what you mean by 'better.'"

"Educated. Intelligent. Not a single mother."

That didn't need translation at all.

"Someone more like us?" John asked without bothering to conceal his malice. "Just be glad I didn't bring her home while you were alive."

He could just imagine _that_ reception. God, he was glad he'd never gone home while his father was alive. Dave had been angry, sure, but John could deal with angry from his brother. Angry and self-righteous coming from his father? No. John wouldn't have needed the complications that sprang from his father's inability to accept John's choice of career and life - would have resented the attempts to control him.

"You're wrong on all counts. For starters, you don't know anything about my life in Atlantis. Or what I've been doing. Or Teyla."

It occurred to John that he was arguing his personal life with the ghost of his father while Atlantis was still in lockdown - at least, John presumed it was in lockdown. He couldn't actually tell - the mist wasn't very informative. But he could feel the promise of pain, hovering beyond the whiteness, which suggested he was still in the city consciousness.

How was he going to get out of here?

He began looking at the mist. It didn't seem to be a barrier - it was just 'there'. As far as John could tell, there was nothing beyond it. His skin twitched a little as he began to walk away from his father.

"You ignoring me?"

"You're dead. And we haven't talked in years." Seven years to be precise - since before Afghanistan.

There was a silence, then his father grunted, "You didn't want to talk to me."

"Ever thought about why not?"

"Often enough after your name turned up as being on a list of soldiers on 'classified' projects, most of whom only returned in boxes - or not at all."

This time, the silence was uncomfortable. John stared at the mist, and wondered what Rodney was doing. Probably panicking. Rodney did that very well. Luckily, Ronon was good at refocusing - although it wasn't something he particularly enjoyed - so Rodney would have someone to keep him facing forward.

And he was avoiding the question that was bubbling beneath his consciousness.

"I didn't know you cared," John said at last. Lightly, because he knew he was setting himself up for a fall when his father sneered, 'I don't.' He said it at all because a part of him was still a child who wanted the approval of a father who couldn't accept his son's differences.

When the answer came, it came with a sigh. "You make it goddamned difficult, John."

His throat clogged. He had to swallow twice to get his reply out as lightly as he wanted it. "Clearly, I inherited that trait from you."

"Your mother always said you were more like me than her. Maybe she was right. Do you plan to have any of your own?"

"We haven't discussed it."

"Maybe you should."

"What happened to 'could do better?'"

"Maybe I'm not disposed to be picky seeing as you're forty and without any children. That you know of," he added. "What happened to the father, anyway?"

It took him a moment to make sense of that sentence.

"He left."

"Not entirely of my own choice."

John tensed. His father's eyes skimmed over his shoulder, and he turned with a sense of dread. The man who stood a few yards behind him was dressed in the Athosian-style shirt, trousers, and trader-overcoat, and he was smiling...sort of.

It was an edged smile, of the kind that John had only seen thrown his way once or twice. He and Kanaan had never been friends. They'd barely been civil. That wasn't a surprise; finding Kanaan here was.

Although if this was hell, well, John figured he had it coming. All he'd need was Kolya, Michael, General Adrians, and Robbie Ingersoll here to finish off his who's who of the people he least-wanted to spend eternity with. Hell, as they said, was other people.

In John's case, it was the people who'd marked his failures through the years.

But at least he had one thing to demand of Kanaan of Athos. "What'd you do to her?"

Thick dark eyebrows rose in query. "I could ask the same of you," he said, with heavy irony. "I left her and my son in your care..."

"You attacked her!"

"I attacked..." Kanaan's eyes sharpened and before John had time to do more than throw up his hands, he had John's shirt in his fists. "What do you mean?"

John brought his hands up, shocked by the suddenness of the move. He tried to break the grip on his shirt, and couldn't. Kanaan held him like a man possessed, the dark eyes searching John's face with a fury that the man had never betrayed while in Atlantis. His own anger rose and he leaned into the emotion, almost relieved to have an outlet for his fear. "I saw the scratches she left on you - after you tried to rape her!"

"I tried to--?" Kanaan paled, and as abruptly as he'd grabbed John, he let go. It took John a moment to regain his footing and when he did, the other man's eyes were fixed on him. "You are mistaken."

"You were so angry she'd moved on that you attacked her--" John broke off as the other man frowned fiercely and shook his head.

"I have never attacked Teyla."

"She fought." His hands fisted by his sides, anger and triumph mixing and mingling, until John wasn't sure which was which. "She'd fought you off because you couldn't take 'no' for an answer! Do you know how long she waited for you to come back? How hard it was for her when you left?"

_You didn't make it easy for us. And we never... I would never have... Not if she'd believed you were coming back._

"That was not me."

"What?"

"Yes, I left her. Yes, I knew it would be difficult. Your people..." Kanaan's jaw worked. "It was why I left Atlantis in the first place. But Teyla... I have never attacked Teyla. She has never had anything to fear from me - not even when I was in Michael's thrall. And she knows that."

No hesitation, no uncertainty; John could see how completely the Athosian man believed it. Something in him believed it, too.

"Then who--?" Understanding glimmered, a distant light in the shadows of ignorance, but even as John reached for it, he knew.

And with knowledge came pain.

It slammed into him with the renewed force of knowledge, of understanding. John knew his enemy now, knew his enemy knew him - had predicted that John would try to fix the city this way, had anticipated his presence within the city's consciousness in much the same way as Teyla said a Wraith Queen was present in the consciousness of her ship.

_Michael._

And, like a ghost risen from the grave, John felt the response: _Sheppard._

It was like a net closed around him, a web formed of lines of pain, entangling him. He felt the corkscrews twist in his skin along a line that marched diagonally across his arm and onto his chest, pinching and squeezing, squirming in his flesh. That line intersected with the long line of hot needles being jabbed down through his belly, intersecting agonies across his abdomen.

Screaming brought little relief, the noise tearing through his teeth as he fought the pain, but there was no rest, no respite, no surcease.

There was someone bellowing at him. Someone speaking clear and quiet beneath the noise. He tried to hear what they were saying through the screech of his tortured flesh, but his senses were in overload and his brain couldn't process what they were yelling at him.

He lost track of time.

This time, when he came back to the whiteness, the pain remained, unavoidable, insistent in his flesh. John panted and fought the urge to writhe in the hope that he could ease it.

"Why's it hitting him so hard?"

His father's voice floated somewhere above him. He couldn't focus his eyes to see.

"Because Michael hates him."

Kanaan's voice held the same element of calm that John had always heard from Teyla in a crisis. It was oddly reassuring, coming from a man who John had never really warmed to - although, given their circumstances, that was understandable.

His father's voice was gruff. "He was always good at making enemies."

"And yet he is good at many other things, too."

"D'you mind not talking about me as though I'm not here?" Somehow, he managed to eke the words out. "What's happening?"

"You are lying down and in pain."

"Captain Obvious."

"Unfortunately, Dr. McKay is not here." Kanaan crouched down and the smile that touched his lips was not entirely nice. "You must go back."

John's vision was coming and going, the clarity tuning in and out like someone couldn't quite get the frequency right. He could hear perfectly well, though, and there was an inexorable note in Kanaan's voice. "Easy to say that. How?"

"That part, I do not know."

Behind Kanaan's shoulder, a frown creased Patrick Sheppard's forehead. "If you're not going to be helpful..."

Kanaan's mouth curled at one corner. "I do not believe that you are being particularly helpful either."

"He's my son."

Ignoring them both, John rolled over onto his hands and knees and fought back the urge to vomit. He concentrated on breathing for a time, cool air in his lungs, deep and slow. There was silence above him, whether out of respect or revulsion, he didn't know and didn't care.

"It helps if you accept it," Kanaan suggested after a few moments.

"What?"

"The pain. It is a part of life - a part of your experience. To deny it is to deny yourself life. As you should know."

"As he should know? Just what exactly is that supposed to mean?"

The dark head didn't turn to look at John's father, who was still hovering beyond his shoulder. Instead, Kanaan met John's gaze and smiled.

John recognised that smile, too. And if it was weird to see Teyla in the expression of the guy who'd fathered her child, it was even weirder to suddenly feel homesick. He was already in Atlantis after all.

_Home isn't where you are, but the people you're with, John._

And the people he wanted to be with - his team-mates, the friends he'd made among the expedition - weren't here. Kanaan understood that; even if John's dad didn't.

He almost managed a smile. It was more of a wince, really, but the sentiment was there. "Should I consider this a 'giving your blessing' kind of thing?"

Another man would have laughed in John's face - or, at the least, snorted with amusement. Kanaan shrugged but apparently took John's meaning; a smile glimmered about his lips. "If I did not think you were worthy of bringing up my son, I would not be here."

"What are you two talking about?"

He could just see himself trying to explain it to his Dad. Hell, John wasn't sure he was clear on what was going on between him and Teyla's ex. "Never mind, Dad."

John managed to climb to his feet, swaying. He felt sick, like the first time he'd been taken out in a twin-seater fighter, but Kanaan was right. When he stopped fighting the pain, stopped shying away from it, it became manageable. It felt like his skin was being flayed from his muscles, but he could stand and speak and think.

It was an improvement on screaming, anyway.

"You look like hell."

"Yeah, well, feels like it, too," said John bluntly.

"Why am I not surprised?"

"Because we went almost seven years without speaking to each other," John reminded his father, pressing his fingers against his eyeballs. Even that hurt. "I don't want to know what you're doing here. All I want to know is how to get out."

"How did you get here in the first place? Reverse the process."

If only it was that easy.

John picked his way through the splinters of memory - the darkness, the city, Teyla, the chair... Something had trapped him in the city's consciousness; someone had known what he would do and had set a trap accordingly.

So much for how he'd gotten in here. Getting out would be more difficult.

Accepting the pain had softened the mist. He could see Atlantis around him, like he was standing in one of the rooms just off the corridor leading to the Control Room, although everything was still slightly blurry, like his brain wasn't quite able to process the world fast enough. Maybe that was the pain.

But the city was full of webbed lines, thick and glistening white like the walls of Wraith hiveships, and in them, John could feel the virus that Michael had used to subdue the city with the intent of making it his. They weren't physical - when John reached tentatively out to touch one, his hand passed right through it with little more than a slightly cold sensation.

He closed his eyes and let the sense of the city wash through him again. It felt like he was pushing his brain through a sieve with razor-sharp wires, but he ignored it.

Atlantis wasn't awake, _per se_. It wasn't really a 'consciousness' in the sense of thoughts and feelings, but it was easier to think of the city as having it's own mind than it was to suggest - as Rodney once had - that the city was a string, and John was a tuning fork they could use to tweak the city.

As Ronon had pointed out upon having the simile explained to him, it wasn't a very good metaphor. Tuning forks resonated with strings, but they couldn't do anything with the string itself. Ronon had quite calmly punctured Rodney's metaphor over the course of lunch, leaving Rodney to slink off and whine to Teyla later in his lab.

He wondered what they were doing, how they were doing out in the 'real world'. Were the webbed corridors of the city an indication that they hadn't yet solved the problem, or had they regained control of Atlantis, and this was this just John's prison for all eternity?

"So exactly what _are_ you doing?"

His father was watching him, hands resting on his hips in a gesture that John suddenly recognised as one of his own. It wasn't an entirely pleasant realisation - that he was his father's son. "Going for a walk."

He was headed for the centre of the city - the Gateroom, where all this had begun. He didn't know how he knew it, but the city's consciousness - even wounded and limping - informed him that the Gateroom was where it had all started.

_From the moment the fake Kanaan came into the city..._

He glanced over his shoulder at the real Kanaan, moving easily through the city with a native's familiarity. How did he feel about this?

"Teyla makes her own choices," said Kanaan out loud.

"You can read my mind?"

"Your thoughts are transparent enough." One corner of the man's mouth tilted upwards as he straightened at the last web before the doors that would part to let them into the corridor that stretched along the stairs facing the Stargate. "We have never been friends, Colonel, but I respect you. And I trust you to bring up my son."

"He's a good kid."

"He is my son." Now the smile held a faint smugness. John's hands briefly itched to wipe it off, before he let that go. Jealousy was beyond the point; Kanaan was dead, and Teyla was with John. Or would be when he got out of here.

First, he had to get out of here.

He faced the door and nearly screamed as a hand came down on his shoulder. As it was, the pain made him twist away - more pain in new areas, although he could still move through it, function with it. It was a part of him, a part of his history, a part of himself.

Thankfully, his father made no move to follow him.

"Dave told you I wished things had worked out different?"

John thought of the few nights he'd spent with his brother, talking about their childhood, their parents, and particularly their father. "Yeah." Something in him wanted to say that he wished things had ended up differently with his father, too.

But, reconciled with his father, would he have ever come to Atlantis? Would he have fought the Wraith, met Teyla, been everything he'd become these last few years?

His team had substituted for the family John had never connected with. If he had connected, would he have come to Atlantis? Would he be here at all, or would he have retired, hooked up with Nancy again, and stayed on Earth, safe and never knowing what he'd missed?

No way to know.

No way to explain this to his father. Not fully.

"I wish..."

He stopped. The words seemed the wrong ones for the man he was. He'd learned not to live with regrets - John had too many things to regret. So he'd never 'wished' for anything - not really; he just lived with what he had, in the now.

In the now, he had a city to save. Again.

"Dad." He turned to meet his father's gaze and hesitated.

What was done was done, and without his father's disapproval, he'd never have known Atlantis, never have met Teyla or Rodney or Ronon, Elizabeth, Carson, Keller, or any of the other people in the city and Pegasus - would never have learned anything of what he could do, what he could be. There were scars, yeah, but he'd learned to live with them. He'd accepted that pain.

What was there to say but, "Thanks."

He didn't have the words for his father - not something he could turn into words. Speak nothing but good to the dead. Or was that good _of_ the dead? Did it matter? Probably not.

John shook his head to clear it, and grimaced at the way it felt like his brains were being shaken loose in his skull. All right then; he'd be doing it through the pain.

A glance back at his dad and Kanaan showed them standing there, regarding him with quizzical looks. His father had an expression that might almost have been pride, while Kanaan looked amused in a way that was achingly familiar - a hint of Teyla's wry smile.

And wasn't that disturbing?

There were things he thought about saying. 'I'm sorry,' or 'I'll look after them.' In the end, he just nodded once - a manly acknowledgement - took a deep breath and swiped his hand past the door console.

If the hallways had seemed covered with web, the Gateroom looked like a spider's lair, thick tendrils of 'web' stretching everywhere, from floor to ceiling, with the dim outline of the gateroom visible through the strands.

With a feeling of the surreal, John walked out onto the landing opposite the Stargate and faced the figure that stood in the centre of the Gateroom floor, his back turned to John, his head lifted to regard the Stargate.

A glance behind showed no sign of either his father or Kanaan. It looked as though John was on his own for this one.

"The first time I saw this room," Michael said without turning, "was when Teyla showed me through the city. I thought it was beautiful."

John remembered his first glimpse of the gateroom - a dark and shadowy hall that slowly lit as the expedition stepped into the room. Wonder, awe, and the strange sense that, in spite of the fact that the city had lain empty for thousands of years, he was being welcomed home.

"That was before I learned that all this place offered me was lies," said Michael.

"Yeah, well, you haven't exactly done us any favours, either," John said after a moment. "So how about we end this here and call it even? You're supposed to be dead, anyway."

Now Michael turned, his eyes burning pale in the still-paler face. There was a cold implacability there that froze John to the core. "There will always be another to take my place," he said. "Eventually, we'll succeed."

John made a note to get out of here and instigate a serious search for Michaels, plural, out through the galaxy. He didn't much want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. He didn't want Teyla looking over her shoulder for the rest of hers.

First, though, he had to get out of here.

Standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the Gateroom - or somewhere that looked a lot like it, John felt the city's consciousness scratching at his mind like someone on the other side of a door. If he could find that door...

"No." Michael was watching him with a faint smile on his lips. "I do not think that you will."

And then the pain hit John again.

Lightning coursed through his flesh, screaming tendrils of fire coruscating through his veins. His body jerked and convulsed, he felt the floor against his side, burning holes in his shoulders as his muscles twitched and his body writhed.

_Pain is a part of life._

But this was beyond anything John could comprehend. How could he make this pain his own?

His mother had died because of him. _If you'd been waiting for her the way you said you were, then she wouldn't have been on that road!_

He'd gone into the Air Force to get away from his father. _Well, I suppose you should get it out of your system while you're young._

He'd married Nancy because he'd loved her and felt it was the right thing to do. _We don't love each other enough to reach out, do we, John?_

He'd lost Mitch and Dex and countless others to war. _Figaro is down. Repeat, the Figaro is down. No survivors._

He'd taken on the S&amp;R missions, hardly slept for the call of absent voices, driven himself to the edge running search patterns, trying not to show how he'd lost hope in this war that couldn't go anywhere. _You're losing it, Shep. I gotta tell you, I'm worried._

He'd risked his life, he'd lost the trust of his superiors, he'd been banished to Antartica. _Welcome to hell, Major. Learn to enjoy it. From the look of your file, you'll be here until you're dead or discharged._

Then he'd come to Pegasus.

Until Atlantis, he'd spent his life turning and running from one thing to the next. It wasn't until he'd come here that he'd found somewhere to belong, somewhere worth fighting for, somewhere to turn and face everything that the world threw at him - solid ground.

Teyla spent her life on the run, too. The thought came out of nowhere, tendrils of strength flowing into him from lifelines he couldn't see but could feel. So did Ronon. And Rodney, too - although he'd never admit it.

The floor of the landing was cool and cold under his back, no longer burning like fiery pain. One certainty in a life of pain and stubbornness.

His friends, who'd become the anchorline of his existence.

They were his past just as much as all the fights, battles, and wars he'd fought that had left scars on him. But more importantly than that, they were his future - as was Torran.

What kind of future could they hope for if they didn't know that Michael was still after them?

Without that part of the puzzle, they'd never know to look over their shoulders. They'd never even know what they were looking for until it was too late.

Atlantis needed to know about Michael.

John needed to get back to tell them.

He pushed himself up.

Every inch of him screamed as he fought what was happening to his body, what his senses were telling him: that thin steel spikes were being stabbed into every part of his body, that he was being whipped with ice and flayed with fire - that he was dying, and all he had to do was lay down and it would end.

"And still you fight," said Michael, climbing the stairs. "Admirable, if mistaken. You will not escape from here, Colonel. You don't have the strength."

John gritted his teeth and braced his fingers against the floor, pushing himself up by force of will. A few feet away, Michael crouched down to see John's face, his coat hems trailing the floor.

_Ignore him. Ignore..._

His knees buckled - there was only so much the body could do in the face of pain.

But was it pain? This concept of the city was in his mind, wasn't it? He'd been sitting in the chair, brain-surfing the city before he got dragged into this undertow - before he'd had conversations with dead men. So this wasn't real - couldn't be real.

_The body cannot exist without the mind._

Thank you for that, Morpheus.

Mind over matter, right? That was what Ancient technology was about. John thought it and if the tech could do it, it did it.

This was his city. His city and his turf, protecting his people and his family.

_Pain is a part of your experience._

But he'd never experienced pain like this. It writhed through his body like the electric agony of a feeding Wraith. It sucked at his flesh, dragging at his vocal chords so his scream was lost in his throat. It pulled at his consciousness, threatening his vision and his sanity.

Abruptly, the pain faded, leaving him breathless, panting, and wondering if someone had spun a dial to reduce the pain. And there were people around him.

_What the hell?_

John looked up at a forest of legs clad in the neat, blue-grey trousers of the expedition personnel and automatically grabbed the hand that reached down to pull him to his feet.

Her hand was cool and substantial - it felt real. Except that she couldn't be.

"You're dead," he said in automatic denial, and grimaced at himself as Elizabeth's mouth twitched slightly.

"Yes," she said, visibly amused. "I am."

"But how--?" John broke off, realising that beyond her was Kate Heitmeyer and Peter Grodin. Beyond them was Aiden Ford, cocking a casual salute, and behind him stood Markham and Ellis, their backs to him, their weapons out and trained on Michael.

The hybridised Wraith glared balefully at them; more than a few of them glared balefully back.

There were scientists whose names John had never learned but whose faces he remembered seeing in the expedition's earliest days, or even later. There were the military men and women whose death certificates he'd signed in grim, bitter silence, knowing that their families wouldn't be told the truth of how they'd died, wondering if they'd ever find out. And there were the auxiliary personnel who'd moved in and out of the city's roster rotations and died during the crises that dotted the city's recent history.

"You were just talking to your father and Kanaan, Colonel," Heightmeyer said with a faint twinkle in her expression. "I think we can conclude that death isn't a barrier here."

About to make a sour retort, John paused as Colonel Sumner emerged from the circle, whole and hale as he'd been before the Wraith drained him.

"Sir."

"Sheppard."

Blue eyes surveyed him up and down, somehow managing to give the impression that Sumner still thought him a loose cannon and untrustworthy. But whatever his expression, his words were crisp and practical. "I suggest that if you want to save this city, you get a move on. We can't hold him off forever."

"Thank you, sir." John looked around at them all, from Elizabeth's wry smile to Ford's broad grin, and wished he could stay longer. "Where were you guys before?"

"You didn't need us before, Colonel," Heitmeyer said with a slight smile. "You needed people to goad you, not protect you."

It made sense. With his childhood insecurities represented by his father, and his uncertainty of his ability to be in a relationship with Teyla represented by Kanaan, they'd been cattleprods rather than comforts.

But these people - even Sumner - were the people who he'd trust to watch his back, to act as lookout ahead.

He hesitated, full of all the things he wanted to say to her, to Ford, to Sumner, to the people he'd failed one way or the other through the years, whether those failures had been small and minor, or whether they'd resulted in their deaths.

"Don't worry about doing a good or a bad job, Sheppard," Sumner interrupted him before he could find the right words to say. "We can't hold him off forever."

"And they're waiting for you," Elizabeth added. She smiled, seeming younger without the weight of the expedition on her shoulders. "Give them our love."

John looked at her, then at Ford, then at Heitmeyer and Sumner and all the other men and women who stood around him, forming a bulwark between him and whatever it was Michael had been doing to him. His father and Kanaan had been able to get him moving again, but it was these people who were protecting him now.

_Enough of that. Take the city back, John!_

He reached out to the city again, caught it, touched it, connected. It glowed a little at it touch, like an exhausted dog wagging its tail at the presence of its master, but unable to do much more.

In fact, it felt rather like John did.

_It can't be that simple._

Maybe it was.

His shoulders felt stiff as he set them back, turned his face towards the Stargate and let his mind flow into the city.

The infection - the virus - was still present in the city systems, making it sluggish and slow. But John was the tuning fork, and the city was the string, and when they were in resonance...

He'd never influenced the city like this before. Previously, John had commanded and it had obeyed. This was different - more like surfing than swimming. He had to navigate between the upswell and downdip of the city's flow, rather than cutting through it, and it was difficult to find that balance...

_Got it._

Atlantis vibrated like a string in resonance, like a jet fighter poised at the liftoff point, like the moment before mouths met.

John wasn't just directing the city - to all intents and purposes, he was the city.

Was this how the original Ancients had felt when they'd made Atlantis? Not just a city-ship that obeyed their commands, but something into which they could enter their awareness, which went beyond the man-machine paradigm and into a realm where the two were inseparable, interchangeable, and indivisible?

If so, John had never known it until now.

It awed him, terrified him with the power at his fingertips.

His thoughts raced through the city, spreading through the very atoms of the building material, racing along pathways he'd never expected to experience. It took only a moment to reach the outermost pylons of the city, but time slowed for him, and he felt every pathway, every neuron, every impulse that sparked through the city.

He could see the city 'outside' - the physical city that was filled with the living, not the dead of his memory.

_There_ was Miko and Dr. Morris trying to bring the city's systems back up, and _there_ was Zelenka, arguing in front of a computer screen with one of the new young scientists whose secret nickname was 'McKay Mark II.' _There_ was the infirmary, with Keller doing the rounds of the injured with her tablet, and _there_ was Carson working over the man seated in the chair...John himself.

That was a moment of strangeness - looking at his body from the vantage point of the city. Were his legs _really_ that short?

John shook the random thought off and sought the control room.

_There_.

Rodney looked haggard, his face sagging by the unkind blue light of his computer screen. Woolsey's mouth was pinched at the corners, downturned in grim weariness. Ronon had braced his arms against one of the control panels, his head lowered between them so his dreads hung by his cheeks, and Teyla...

Teyla held Torran in her arms, dark circles of exhaustion hovering beneath her eyes. As John watched, tears threatened but didn't spill over - she blinked them away before they could fall. But even in her weariness, she seemed made of steel, able to withstanding anything the universe cared to throw at her. John remembered thinking that the first day he'd met her; that this was a woman who'd seen death and kept living without giving in to despair - a woman he'd like to know better.

That strength had made him step forward in the tent that morning and offer a hand in friendship - metaphorically, if not physically.

How far they'd come.

Pain skittered distantly across his nerve endings, a reminder of the infection that flamed in the city.

John closed his eyes and sought out the virus through Atlantis' network.

In the control room, technicians swore as their screens began showing 'disconnected' popups. In the labs, people cried out as their work was lost when the system connections died. Rodney cursed as his laptop remained on the battery, but the lights dimmed as John drained all power from the city and directed it to fight Michael's virus.

Atlantis' subroutines were an army and he was the general fighting a war against an enemy as insidious as its maker.

Was it his imagination that portrayed the fight as Atlantis' fighting military against hybrid creatures that strode through the corridors of the city? John didn't know and didn't care. What he felt was the fight in 'his' senses - every scratch and scrape and discarded routine, every twisting worm of Michael's code as it fought to replicate itself faster than the city's subroutines could stamp it out.

In his mind's eye, military men and women wielded P-90s and held position against the driving wedges of the hybrids that moved in and slaughtered without mercy, changing as they fought, trying to find the way in.

In the end, it was easier than John had expected. Not 'easy' but not 'hard' either.

The subroutines reported back - all clear, all clean.

John _felt_ it as he stood on the stairs leading down to the Gateroom floor, the city's power like a golden glow in every cell of his body.

Only one bitter point remained.

Michael stared defiantly up at John, unbowed, unrepentant. "And what are you waiting for, Colonel? You have your city back. You have your people back. Unless you have some grand speech you plan to make to me?"

He stared at the architect of so many of Atlantis' troubles for the last few years for a long moment. Then, "No. I don't."

The Beretta he lifted in his hand fired once, and Michael's eyes grew glassy and blank beneath the bloody hole in his forehead. He'd faded before he hit the ground.

John lowered his arm with a long exhalation. That was one to Teyla and one to him. Come to think of it - that was _two_ to Teyla: the Michael who had invaded the city just before Kanaan left, and the Kanaan who'd returned to the city only to betray it. He flicked the gun safety back on - never mind that none of this was _real_ as he saw it - and holstered it.

"So," he said to Elizabeth and the others gathered around him. "What now?"

"You go back out into the real world?"

"I meant...what happens to you guys?"

"You know we're not really here, Colonel," said Kate Heitmeyer after a moment, during which a great silence descended on the group and various looks were exchanged.

"You're hallucinating, John," said Elizabeth. "We're just figments of your imagination."

A little embarrassed to be caught in the middle of an implied belief in ghosts, John frowned. "That doesn't make sense. I wouldn't have... I mean, I don't remember half of their names!" One hand waved at the scientists who hovered just outside the circle of people John _had_ remembered.

Heitmeyer hesitated a moment, the way she used to do when she was trying to find an alternative way to explain the situation to John. "Colonel, it might help to think of us as what you know without knowing."

"What I know without...?"

A few feet away, Aiden Ford rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. "God, sir, just get out of here," he said. "Go forth, live life, and stop kicking yourself in the head!"

"Lieutenant..."

Ford just grinned at Sumner's warning, which seemed to be more about discipline than about Sumner disagreeing with the young man. The dead Colonel's gaze was cool, but he nodded at John in a kind of acknowledgement before stepping back.

John began to turn to face the windows opposite the gate. Then he paused and turned back, trying to think of something to say. He couldn't just leave like this, but he'd always sucked at goodbyes.

"Just go, John," Elizabeth said, her eyes gleaming with laughter. "We'll still be here when you need us."

And then, as though that had been a signal, the ghosts of John's Christmas past melted away like frost leaves in the sunlight, leaving him alone in the empty city.

Not quite alone.

_We seem to have full control of the city again, but we're still broadcasting._

So shut it off?

Oh, sure, I'll just wander over here and flip the switch that says 'turn off the broadcast signal to the Wraith', shall I?

If there's one--

Ronon!

Rodney.

Sorry.

He's not.

No, I'm not. Stop interrupting me! Go and...do something. Else. But not Teyla.

I'm gonna go see Sheppard. Teyla? Want to take--

No! No! See Don! Go see Don!

Torran...

It's okay. I'll take him. You'll be okay?

We're not going to throw her off the balcony or anything!

I'd like to see you try!

I would not advise it.

They were still out there.

But one more thing still needed to be done.

Atlantis' power flowed through him like a current, electric and electrifying, and he felt the city's broadcast of its position - a thin message sent out into space on a repeater signal. John killed it, then sent out a nullifying pulse on another wave to scramble any instances of the message still travelling through space. Maybe the message would flow through without ever being picked up. Maybe someone would find it and follow it to Atlantis.

He'd worry about that later.

Right now, he had people to return to - his team. His friends and responsibilities. His city.

Waiting for him.

John touched the city again. _Let me out._ This time, there was no struggle involved, just the familiar mental surge that lifted him, breaking the link with the city and pushing his senses back into his body.

His body said _pain_.

It jarred his perceptions, that one moment of agony like the excruciating torture he'd experienced while in the city, and he nearly choked on his tongue as his body spasmed beneath the force of it.

Just as abruptly, the pain eased back to a dull ache, leaving him gasping like a fish out of water.

When he could think again, he was almost surprised to realise he was alive.

The chair was warm beneath him, the silver chasings of the armrests warm under his arms. His mouth felt dry but his hair felt damp. And as the sound of his pounding heart began subsiding, he realised there were people talking to him.

"Colonel?" Fabric fluttered nearby, then a hand touched his wrist, warm fingers feeling for his pulse. "John?"

He cracked open an eye. Carson's anxious expression filled his vision.

"I'm here."

"Oh, thank God," breathed Carson, before he reached for his earpiece. "He's awake." Then, dropping his hand, he regarded John with a steady, studying gaze. "Where exactly is 'here', Colonel?"

It seemed an odd question. "Shouldn't I be asking that question?"

The inflection registered as the doc opened his mouth to elaborate. Carson wasn't asking him where he was for informational purposes, he was asking to see if John had his wits about him.

"Oh. Uh, the chair room in Atlantis. Lieutenant-Colonel John Sheppard, United States Air Force, 534-221-9938. I'm the military leader of Atlantis, and Ronon, Teyla, and Rodney are on my team. Teyla and I have an understanding about shared beds, and twenty-seven times thirteen is three hundred and fifty one." He paused for a long, deep breath of air. "And everything hurts. Is that enough, or do you want more?"

The subtle creases of anxiety gave way to a wry smile. "I think we've got enough. Welcome back, John."

It was good to be back.


	5. Chapter 5

**Epilogue**

There was a relief and pleasure to sitting in the infirmary with her son and her team-mates - a moment of peace amidst the madness of the day they'd been through.

Teyla savoured the banter between Rodney and John, along with Ronon's broad grin, and the weight of her son's body on her lap where she rested against John's pillows. Then, seeing Rodney's hand questing after the tub of chocolate pudding on John's tray, she neatly snatched it away from beneath his fingers.

"Hey!"

"That is not yours."

"Well, he's not eating it!"

"He has not yet decided to eat it." She held the pudding cup out to John as Rodney settled back at the foot of the bed, huffing.

Carefully extracting his hand from Torran's limp grip, John flashed her a brief smile and his fingers rested on hers for a moment before he took the cup from her. "Thanks, Teyla. Go get your own pudding, Rodney. I'm sure the mess hall has plenty left."

"They ran out," said Rodney sulkily. "Apparently Hoshi and his group did a pudding run yesterday and left them short today!"

"Wasn't there an alternative?" Ronon asked, shifting his hip on the other side of the bed.

"Apple pie. The one they make with lemon juice so I can't eat it!"

"They don't make it from lemon juice so you can't eat it, Rodney," John said, sounding exasperated. "And that doesn't mean you can steal my pudding!"

"It'll make you fat."

Ronon arched a brow. "Won't the pudding make you fat, too?"

"I'm already fat, so what difference does it make?"

"The difference is that it's _my_ pudding." And, as though to make a point, John peeled back the lid and stuck the spoon in, levering out a chunk of the chocolatey mass and sticking it in his mouth with obvious pleasure. "And you can't have it."

Teyla grinned as Rodney rolled his eyes and muttered about going through the infirmary to see if anyone had left their pudding. "You will only find yourself disappointed, Rodney," she said, brushing back her son's hair. "It is one of the more popular desserts."

"Story of my life."

"I thought the story of your life was how nobody recognised your genius," said Ronon with a grin.

"That, too. Good thing they do now." He smirked at his friends.

"Teyla got you into the system."

"And John cleared out the virus," she added, biting back a smile.

Rodney's airy wave held none of the injury it might have back when Teyla first met him. "Hey, I got us out of the lockdown! And that was even before you did your Jedi mind trick with Michael. Speaking of which, did Woolsey say anything to you about--" On the edge of her vision, John shifted. "Um, about taking on some of the...uh...technical training. You're not bad for--"

The change in topic was very obvious. Teyla contemplated ignoring it for a moment, then looked to John. She wanted to know this. "What did Mr. Woolsey wish to speak to me about?"

"What makes you think I know?"

Teyla gave him a very level, very steady look - the one that Laura had called her 'I wasn't born yesterday' look. "John."

To give him his due, he held firm, and Rodney refused to look at her at all. Teyla turned to Ronon, trusting that common sense would override whatever qualms either John or Rodney was holding regarding that which Mr. Woolsey had wished to discuss with them."

"They want to find Michael's lab and the clones," he said immediately. When her brows drew together, he elaborated on their hesitation. "They thought it might be traumatic for you. Or the wrong time."

_Ah._ "It is not," she said, simply. "The clones are dead."

Ronon nodded. "It'd be good to be sure, though."

"Woolsey wants to be sure," John said after a moment. "So do I."

"We don't want him coming back after Atlantis again."

"Or Torran and Teyla."

"He is dead."

"But what if he's not?"

"Then we'll hunt him down and kill him again." Ronon bared his teeth in a feral grin. "And if there's another one, I get the next one."

"As many times as necessary," John added, and if he was not so bloodthirsty as their team-mate, there was an element of vengefulness to his voice.

Teyla looked from him to Ronon and back and shook her head at them, half-amused, half-rueful. "It will not be necessary. He is dead." She remembered the echo-back of his minds, delicately connected through the mental link of the Wraith - the link through which she had struck to end him, once for all time.

She did not blame them for being if not precisely skeptical, uninclined to believe what they had not experienced. John and Rodney were men of proof, after all. While they trusted her, they would believe that she could be mistaken or wrong. And they and the city had suffered much at Michael's hands.

It would be a long time before Atlantis could reassure itself that Michael was dead.

Teyla _knew_.

"Do you know where Michael had his lab?" John asked after a moment. "Look, I believe that you killed him, Teyla, but...a lot of people aren't going to be comfortable without knowing."

"And if you know where his lab is...it might help us find a solution to the Wraith that doesn't effectively involve genocide."

"Unlike all the other solutions you proposed?"

Rodney shot Ronon a glare and began to protest that they hadn't been _his_ solutions. Teyla decided to move in before they could start an argument. It had been a long day and she was tired.

"I do not know where it is," she explained. While she remembered going through the entirety of Michael's mind in her search for his plans, she had retained only part of the whole.

"But?"

She met John's gaze over her son's head, not asking how he'd known there was to be more. "There were things I remember from his mind that made no sense. They do not fit with his plan for the galaxy."

"Not what we _know_ of his grand plan for the galaxy," Rodney corrected.

"Not what we know," she agreed.

She should know better than to underestimate Michael by now.

Teyla looked down at the son Michael had coveted, not for his laughter or his trust or his spirit - not for any of the things Teyla adored in her son - but purely for what his DNA could bring the hybrid Wraith. The knowledge of his plans was there in her mind, she suspected - no, _knew_ \- but she could not bring it back to recall so easily.

She did not want to.

And yet, much might hinge on it...

"Perhaps, under meditation, it might be possible to remember more," she began.

A hand touched her wrist. "Not tonight," John said firmly, sliding his fingers into hers. "It's not a rush, we'd just like to find more of his labs and work out what he was doing."

Teyla smiled at the warmth of his hand in hers. "Maybe tomorrow," she conceded, smiling down at him.

His expression softened, recalling nights spent sleeping and nights spent awake, conversations by dusk and firelight and screenlight, arguments that ended in silences broken only when conversation became needful, and arguments that ended in bed with the delicious glide of slick flesh agaist hot skin.

Teyla's mouth curved and her cheeks heated at his gaze, only to be startled when Rodney groaned from the foot of the bed.

"Can't you guys at least get a room?"

"We have rooms, Rodney," said John mildly.

They had their own rooms.

Teyla stared down at her son. She had not thought about it until now, but when Carson came to tell them that visiting time was over, she and Torran would be going back to her rooms where Michael had tried to rape her.

She had avoided thinking about it until now - Kanaan's beloved face, twisted in a vicious parody of passion as his hips ground into hers, his desire unmistakeable and unavoidable. Until today, she had never tried to avoid it - she had never needed to.

"Teyla?"

"I am fine," Teyla said swiftly, before any of them started fussing or called for Jennifer. "I... It has been a long day."

"You sure you'll be okay tonight?" Ronon asked. He looked from her to John and something passed between the two men - one of their silent messages on what Rodney called 'fighters channel.'

"I do not need your protection," she said, interpreting Ronon's expression as a query as to whether John wanted him to keep an eye on her. "Torran and I will be fine."

And if she spent a sleepless night or two, then she would live with that. There were other nights she had spent awake, haunted by the nightmares of what was and had been.

"Actually," said John in the tone that Teyla had always thought sounded like he was clearing his throat to say something important, "I was thinking..." He hesitated, then took a deep breath. "I thought you and Torran and I might...move in together. When Carson finally lets me out, that is."

Beyond, in the broader infirmary, it seemed to Teyla that the chattering noise of other visitors hushed a little, as though John's statement had been audible to them.

She could barely hear through the rushing in her ears.

His cheeks were pink but his eyes were steady on hers, flicking only from one eye to the other to gauge her reaction to his proposal - for it was a proposal. Teyla was under no misapprehension that this was a casual move for him. It was meaningful to him, important.

Still, she was surprised.

"I..." A glance down the end of the bed showed the other two watching them. Rodney was looking expectant, Ronon had a smirk on his face. Both expressions fell as she said firmly, "If you would excuse us?"

It was not that this was private or personal - as she had told John all those months ago, she had lived in the space between what was personal and what was important for the length of her life. But this was a discussion that should not have onlookers - as much for John's sake as hers, if not more.

Much to her surprise, Rodney went without a word, Ronon a mere step behind him.

John dropped his eyes to Torran's slumbering form between them.

"John..."

"I shouldn't have put you on the spot," he said hurriedly. "I just thought you mightn't want to stay there after what happened. If you're okay with it, then...that's fine. You shouldn't feel you have to."

The uncertainty was not new. The willingness to be unsure _was_.

This morning, he had stood on the path from the river and his gaze had slid from hers as though ashamed. John had always wished to believe himself worthy, and yet so often had never been able to find the belief within himself, needing instead to rely on others for that belief.

Within his spirit, something still desired that affirmation; but there was something new in the look he gave her.

Teyla hesitated over asking, but the change had made her curious. "You said you spoke with the dead while you were unconscious."

It was a change of topic, but she would bring it back to his offer eventually. There was more to this than merely a brief question and an even briefer acceptance.

He had told them briefly of what had passed in his consciousness while he was in the grip of the chair - the pain, the city, the dead with whom he'd spoken. While Rodney had made jokes about someone called 'Joel Haley Osmont', Teyla had spoken only briefly of her 'conversation' with Kanaan in the woods of Old Athos.

Kanaan would always be with her in her heart and in their son.

Yet if she had gained comfort and wisdom from Kanaan's presence, then surely there had been someone who had given John strength. He had spoken of Elizabeth, of Ford, of Kate, and Colonel Sumner - people whose lives or deaths had been meaningful to John...and yet, those seemed...not enough.

He stared at their linked fingers for a long while.

"I saw my dad," he said at last. "My dad and Kanaan."

Teyla stared at him. She understood the first - John's father had died without resolving the old bitterness between the two men - but Kanaan?

"What--? How--?" The questions formed in her mind but splintered as they reached her lips.

John snorted softly. "Rodney would say this sounds like a bad Lifetime movie. I don't know how. But I think... I think I needed to hear from them."

It seemed...ridiculous. And yet...

Teyla remembered speaking with Kanaan in Old Athos: his affection, his open honesty as he spoke of the things they had not addressed while he lived in Atlantis. He did not begrudge her love for John; they had been friends long before they had been lovers and he had always understood her better than most.

Was it so strange to think that there might be things left unfinished between Kanaan and John?

Strange enough.

"You _needed_ to hear from them?"

John grimaced. "Heitmeyer - or the part of my mind that sounded like Heitmeyer - said that they were the things I didn't know I didn't know and that I needed to know."

It took her a few seconds to work out the meaning of his statement, and still she was not sure she had grasped the full of it. "I believe you have confused me," she said after a moment.

"I think I confused myself," he admitted with a smile to match her own. "But...."

He seemed to have more to say, so she let the silence rest while he searched for words, his eyes focusing on something beyond her shoulder. But after a few seconds, he shook his head and his gaze clung to her face, sliding over her features with all the tenderness of a caress.

"You cared about Kanaan enough to have Torran and move in with him. I don't... I don't expect the same from you, Teyla. Well, it'd be nice, but..." He shrugged and seemed embarrassed. "I'm fine with how things are if you're okay with them, Teyla."

"But you would like to change how things are."

"Well, yeah. I...I'd like...more. But you don't have to feel obligated--"

His frankness disarmed her, the emotional directness endearing him more firmly than all the smoothly loverlike words in the universe.

Teyla lifted her hand and let her fingers brush his cheek, rough with the growing stubble of his beard. Then she leaned in, feeling the welling tenderness that tightened her throat and loosened her belly as their lips met and sweet softness bloomed between them.

"You are asking me to share tents?" Teyla asked when she lifted her lips from his.

It was an Athosian phrase, and John knew of it. He understood it just as well as she'd understood what he was offering in asking her to move in with him: togetherness, commitment, and as much permanency as life in Pegasus would grant them.

At least today, if tomorrow was not certain.

To Teyla, that meant much; to John, she knew, it meant even more.

"Yes," he said without hesitation or prevarication, and although his eyes lingered on her lips, there was tension in the muscles of his jaw, beneath her fingertips.

This was a new side of John.

And as she stroked her fingers along the rasping edge of his chin, Teyla reflected that she rather liked this new aspect of him.

"Then, yes," she said, feeling her mouth quirk to one side. "I will share tents with you."

His eyes widened a little, became intent, even as something in them softened, heated with a promise. "You're sure?"

Teyla laughed a little at the wondering note in the question and kissed him again.

This time, he leaned in, his mouth teasing her with a promise of more, and when their lips parted, John looked smugly pleased with himself. If some things had changed, there were some things that had not. Whatever peace he had found in his sojourns through his mind, he would still question himself. And that was no bad thing.

At least on this, she would never leave him to question very long.

"I have always been sure, John."

He swallowed. Nodded. And shifted in the sheets, as though he was setting his shoulders. His fingers laced through hers. "All right. Then let's do this thing."

Together they would live and love and laugh, and if it ended too soon, Teyla would never regret having loved him. Together, they would fight the Wraith and other threats to their peoples with Ronon and Rodney at their backs, and would show her son how to be a man of Pegasus and Atlantis. Together, they would deal with whatever Michael had left behind in his attempt to control the galaxy.

Together.

\- **fin** -


End file.
